Self-Saucing Lemon Pudding

January is the month I give up pretending and start buying lemons by the bagful. The good ones arrive around now, Amalfi if you're lucky, the heavy yellow sort with a few dark leaves still attached, smelling so strongly of themselves that the paper bag carries the scent home with you. They're the one thing the supermarket can't flatten. The market decides, and in January, the market decides lemons.

This is a pudding I make on weeknights when the evening has gone cold and slightly sorry for itself and there's nothing on television. You mix everything in one bowl, fold in some whisked egg whites, pour it into a buttered dish, and slide it into the oven. Forty minutes later, it comes out having performed a small piece of kitchen magic: the batter has separated itself into a pale golden sponge floating on top of a pool of hot, sharp lemon curd. I've made it dozens of times and I still don't entirely understand how it works. I don't need to.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago. "Lemon pudding. Cold Tuesday. Enough." That's still the whole entry. Some recipes don't need more than that.

Serve it warm, with cold cream poured straight from the jug so it runs over the top in pale rivers and meets the hot sauce underneath. There are few better feelings than putting a warm bowl of this in front of someone on a dark evening. We're only making dinner. But dinner, done with attention, is the thing.