Faggots with Onion Gravy and Mushy Peas

January. The kind of evening where the windows are dark by half four and the kitchen is the only warm room in the house. This is when faggots make sense. Not before.

They're a Midlands dish, a Welsh dish, a Black Country dish. Depending on who you ask, the recipebelongs to their grandmother and no one else's. What it always is: pork liver and belly, sage and onion and breadcrumbs, shaped into generous rounds and braised slowly in a dark onion gravy until the whole kitchen smells of something your body recognises before your brain catches up. Mushy peas on the side, bright green against the brown. A meal that costs next to nothing and gives back more than it should.

I first ate proper ones from a market stall on a wet Saturday in a town I can't quite remember the name of. Polystyrene tray. Wooden fork. Gravy soaking through the bottom. I wrote it down in the notebook that evening: offal, sage, gravy, rain. Some meals mark themselves.

This is home cooking at its most honest. Offal is cheap because people have forgotten what to do with it, which is a shame, because it carries a depth of savoury flavour that lean cuts simply can't reach. Your butcher will have pork liver. Ask for caul fat too, the lacy membrane that wraps the faggots and bastes them as they braise. If you can't get it, don't worry. Shape them firmly and they'll hold their own. The gravy does most of the work. We're only making dinner.