Cheese Sauce

This is a January sauce. Or a February one. Any evening when the dark comes in early and you need something the colour of a kitchen lamp on the table in front of you. Cheese sauce belongs to winter the way salads belong to July.

It starts with a roux, which is just butter and flour cooked together until they smell faintly biscuity, and then milk added slowly until you've got a smooth white sauce. That bit has a name and a French history and a reputation for being fussy, but it isn't. It's stirring. Pay attention for ten minutes and it does what it's told. The cheese goes in at the end, off the heat, with a teaspoon of English mustard that you might think is too much and isn't. The mustard doesn't make the sauce taste of mustard. It makes the cheese taste more of itself.

I make this most often for cauliflower cheese, which is the dish it was born for. But it goes over leeks, over macaroni, over a baked potato split open and steaming. Pour it over anything pale and slightly dull and you've turned dinner into something people will reach across the table for. We're only making dinner. But sometimes dinner is exactly enough.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago, on a wet November evening: "Cheese sauce. Cauliflower. Rain on the window. Right food, right evening." That's still about all there is to say.