Deeply Autumnal Dinner for 8

• Chestnut and pancetta salad
• Roast venison fillet with apple purée and rosemary sauce
• Peas and celeriac mash
• Quinces poached in muscat with lemon ice-cream, or Marsala muscovado custard with or without muskily spiced prunes

I don’t think one needs to be putting on a theme park of the seasons quite, but autumn is a hard one to resist. One can get a little too taken with all those mists and mellow fruitfulness, become a little too parodically bosky, and lost in shades of prune and plum, but this menu seems to me to stop just this side of all that. The chestnuts are coming into the shops (even if I do recommend the vacuum-packed peeled ones), and although venison is available all the year around now, it still feels autumnal, especially when paired with another seasonal – apples. And we have such a short time to take a stab at quinces, we may as well exploit it as we can. For those who don’t feel up to tackling this once commonly eaten, now almost exotically unfamiliar fruit, I suggest an eggy and creamy baked custard, buff coloured with Marsala and fudgy muscovado sugar. And if that’s too much to ask, then all you need to do is provide cheese (gorgonzola, roquefort or stilton and maybe something blander for those who don’t know a good thing when they taste one) and a gorgeous plate of those ambrosial fat and sepia-tinged muscat grapes.