Roast Pheasant with Bacon and Bread Sauce

October. The clocks have gone back and the kitchen window is dark by five. This is when pheasant makes sense.

A hen bird is what you want. Smaller than the cock, more tender, less likely to dry out in the oven. Ask your butcher, or find one at the market if you're lucky enough to have a game dealer nearby. The market decides, and in these cold months it decides on something worth cooking. You don't need to do much to a pheasant. A good bird, some butter, a few rashers of bacon draped over the breast. The bacon bastes the meat as it renders, and by the time you take the bird out of the oven the rashers have gone crisp and salty and golden, and the kitchen smells of thyme and roasting game and rendered fat. That's the smell of a proper November evening.

And then there's bread sauce. I know it divides people. Some find it bland, nursery food, something their grandmother made and they've never quite forgiven. They're wrong, or they've only had the bad kind. A properly made bread sauce, the milk infused slowly with onion and cloves and bay until it smells like a cold afternoon, then thickened with good breadcrumbs and finished with butter and nutmeg, is one of the quietly splendid things in British cooking. It does for pheasant what mint sauce does for lamb: it belongs there, and the plate feels wrong without it.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago. Pheasant, bacon, bread sauce, November, rain. I make it every year and the note hasn't changed. We're only making dinner, but some dinners are worth the notebook.