Cawl

January rain. The kind that doesn't stop, that turns the garden path to mud and makes the window glass run with water all afternoon. That's a cawl evening. You don't plan it weeks ahead. You feel it in the weather.

Every Welsh family has a version of this. Some start with beef, some with bacon. Mine uses lamb neck, bone in, browned properly in a heavy pot until the kitchen fills with the smell of rendered fat and caramelised meat. The roots go in next: carrots, swede, parsnips, whatever the season and the market offer. Then the potatoes, then the leeks, because leeks need the least time and deserve the most respect. It simmers. You wait. The house warms.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago, after making it for the first time from a scribbled recipe given to me by a woman at a farmers' market near Brecon. She said, "There's no wrong way, love, only your way." A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. She was right. I've been adjusting it ever since, and I expect I always will.

Make it a day ahead if you can. Cawl improves overnight in the way that certain things do: the broth thickens, the lamb softens further, the vegetables hold their shape but absorb the stock until they taste of the whole pot rather than themselves. Reheated slowly the next day, with thick bread and a crumble of Caerphilly on the side, it's one of the more useful things you can put in front of someone on a cold evening. There are few better feelings.