Nigel Slater’s golden autumnal recipes

Celebrate the cooler evenings with warming cheddar and cider soup, roast pumpkin with date dressing and poached pears with fudge sauce

There is, I suggest, no better time to be in the kitchen than now. The ingredients of the season – new hazelnuts and walnuts, the first pumpkins, locally grown pears and cider – are beckoning and the cooking goes into another gear. The cooler evenings bring with them requests for deep bowls of soup, roast vegetables and warm grains and, in my house at least, the need for a cake on the table. This collection of recipes celebrates the welcome return, the golden glow, of autumn cooking.