September. The Bramleys are falling off the tree faster than I can use them, which is the best problem a kitchen can have. The air has turned. Not cold yet, but the evenings draw in earlier and the kitchen light goes amber by six. This is fidget pie weather.

It's a Shropshire dish, old and unfashionable, the kind of thing that was packed into baskets and carried to the fields at harvest time. Gammon, apples, onions, cider, pastry. Nothing clever. The name probably comes from "fitchett," an old word for a side of bacon, though nobody seems entirely sure and it hardly matters. What matters is that it works: the salt of the gammon against the sharp collapse of Bramley apple, sweetened onions binding the two together, and a good crust holding the lot in place while the cider turns to a thin, cidery sauce underneath.

I make it every year when the apples come in. The notebook says: "Fidget pie. First Bramleys. Kitchen smelled of cider and nutmeg. Ate too much." That's the whole review. I've cooked more sophisticated things in thirty years of writing about food, but few that felt as right as this one does on the right evening. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and this one has been going on for centuries between orchards and kitchens and people who needed feeding.

It asks very little of you. Make a simple pastry. Pile everything in. Trust the oven. There are few better feelings than carrying a golden pie to the table and cutting into it while someone watches.