October rain on the window. The Bramleys are in, the last of them, pulled from the tree at the bottom of the garden where they've been dropping into the grass all month. This is their best use, I think. Not a crumble, not a sauce, but here, layered with lamb and onion and dark, sticky prunes inside a pie that most people have never heard of and Devon is in danger of losing altogether.

Devonshire squab pie has nothing to do with squab. No pigeon. The name is old and the reason for it is lost, which feels about right for a dish this unassuming. It's lamb and apples under pastry. That's all. But the balance of sweet and savoury is quietly remarkable, the kind of thing that makes you put your fork down after the first bite and look at the plate properly, because something is happening that you didn't expect. The apple melts into the lamb juices. The prunes go soft and almost jammy. The nutmeg, grated generously, ties it all together without announcing itself.

I found this recipe years ago in a second-hand bookshop in Totnes, in a little paperback of West Country cooking that cost fifty pence and smelled of damp. I wrote it down in the notebook and have been making it every autumn since. It's the kind of pie that belongs to a particular sort of evening: cold outside, warm in, nowhere to be. Right food, right evening.

There are few better feelings than putting a warm pie in front of someone on a night like that and watching them come back for a second slice without being asked.