Sage

At this time of year it is a family tradition to make stuffing, mainly from white breadcrumbs, onion and sage, but with some other ingredients which are properly kept secret. A secret of the craft. With the current tradition being to stuff a pie dish rather than to stuff a bird.

Sometimes, we have adequate supplies of fresh sage in the garden. Sometimes, we have been reduced to dried sage, which lacks the pungency, the immediacy of the fresh. More recently, Waitrose have taken to selling small sage plants, forced in bit of peat, rather in the way of punnets of cress, which have served well.

But this year, Sainsbury's are offering fresh sage leaves in packets. With a guaranteed number of leaves in each packet. Which must be the first time that we have bought the stuff by the leaf.

PS: much later: one of the two packets has now been opened and contained approximately double the number of leaves advertised. Perhaps the Sainsbury's quality people have some rule about how many millimetres long a leaf has to be before it counts as one of the 16.