Serves 4

Tweedy jackets, riding boots and jodhpurs are all fashionable, just as they always have been in the autumn. Few designers can resist the allure of the apparently functional and entirely classic good looks of the English aristocracy and that applies to everyone from Coco Chanel, who based much of her aesthetic on that fact, to Vivienne Westwood and, in particular this season, Phoebe Philo, whose Celine pre-collection is as British as fish and chips on the beach.

Notebook

Serves 4

Falling in love, they say, is like eating an unknown mushroom. You never know it's the real thing until it is too late. This summer is already producing crops of wild mushrooms – ceps, chanterelles, summer truffles and other delicious kinds, which are appearing in profusion in the warm, damp woodland soil.

They were the dishes that endeared Italian restaurants to our hearts: crisply crumbed escalope Milanese, sage-laced saltimbocca, saucy osso buco with its succulent pools of marrowbone and piccata, which performed such a seductive dance on the tongue with lemon and capers. Then, in an instant, the zeitgeist changed and it was no longer politically correct to eat veal or offer it to friends.

If you entertain regularly at home you must be familiar with the scenario when you find out at the last minute that one of your guests is a vegetarian and you need to rustle up something suitable in a hurry. First of all, you need to find out exactly what sort of vegetarians they are, as many people who claim to be vegetarians actually eat fish (they are pescatorians, in other words) and some of them eat chicken, which makes it even more confusing... And if your guests are vegans, then menu planning is even harder, as you won't be able to use butter, cream or eggs.