Summer Pudding

There's a fortnight in July when the garden and the market both lose their heads at the same time. The raspberry canes are leaning under their own weight. The blackcurrants are so dark they look nearly blue. The strawberries have gone past the polite early-season phase and into the glut, the moment when you bring home more than you meant to and eat the last handful standing at the sink.

That's when you make summer pudding. Not before. You can buy berries in February, of course, but they taste of cardboard and disappointment, and this isn't a pudding that forgives thin ingredients. It needs fruit that tastes like itself. The market decides.

The method is barely a method. You warm the berries with sugar until their juices run. You line a basin with bread. You fill it, weight it, and walk away. Overnight, the juice does the work, soaking through the bread until there isn't a pale patch left, just deep, saturated colour and the concentrated taste of high summer held in a dome you can turn out onto a plate.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: bread, berries, cream, Sunday. There hasn't been a July since when I haven't made one. It's the closest thing I know to bottling a season.