Homity Pie

October, and the kitchen window has started to steam up again. I brought potatoes home from the market on Saturday, the small waxy sort that hold their shape when you slice them, along with onions that smelled like they meant it. A homity pie was the only sensible conclusion.

This is a Devon dish, though I suspect nobody in Devon would agree on a single recipe for it. An open-topped pie of sliced potatoes and slow-cooked onions, bound with cream and buried under cheese. It came out of wartime frugality and stayed because it's good. Not good for a vegetable pie, not good considering it's meatless. Just good. The kind of good where someone finishes a slice, pauses, and cuts another without asking.

The onions do most of the work. Twenty minutes over a gentle heat, softening until they're sweet and golden, and they become the backbone of the whole thing. The potatoes give it heft. The cream and cheese make it rich without being heavy. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, so adjust the quantities to your tin and your appetite. More cheese is seldom wrong.

I wrote it down in the notebook last week: potatoes, onions, cheese, Tuesday, rain on the window. There are few better feelings than putting a warm plate of this in front of someone on a cold evening and watching their shoulders drop.