Welcoming January Lunch for 6

• Braised pheasant with mushrooms and bacon
• Pig’s bum

This is such a wonderful winter lunch: in January the memory of all those slabs and plates of meat from Christmas is near enough to make one weepily grateful for a sweetly steamy bowl of stew. The pudding afterwards – as glorious as its name – is the result of a conversation I once had with Antony Worrall Thompson. I’d been, I think, recounting the gastronomic glories of rhubarb; he’d countered by telling me of a steamed pudding he’d had at prep school they always called pig’s bum, because of the peculiar form and coloration of this stodgy rhubarb steamed sponge. I, understandably, was entranced. I have no idea how my version of this pudding measures up to his remembered original, my inspiration, but I have grown as fond of it as I could never become of any of the puddings I remember from the school lunches of my past.