My wife Alice owns a little shop in our town, and every so often a local fisherman drops off some amazing trout. He charges us only a few pounds for the fish and, more often than not, I’ll cure and cold smoke them – they’re always delicious.

Cold smoking is much simpler than you may think; anyone can turn their hand to it. I’m lucky because I can use our chimney, which I can reach without worrying about falling to the ground. As the fire below smoulders away gently, a fish hangs quietly near the top, with cool, oak smoke slowly passing it by. In cold smoking, the smoke merely flavours (rather than cooks) the fish, so it shouldn’t really go above 25°C (77°F).

In its crudest form a cold smoker is really just a fire chamber and a smoke chamber connected via a pipe long enough to allow the smoke to cool before it reaches the food. At River Cottage we connected an old pot-bellied stove to a cider barrel, but I’ve heard of people making cold smokers out of wardrobes, gun cupboards, broken fridges and even old-fashioned red phone boxes. You either hang the fish or meat inside or lay it on racks. You can buy small mesh coils that you fill with sawdust or wood chip (hardwoods are best – I like the wood from fruit trees, as well as the wood from the wonderful bay), that you light and place in the bottom of a smoke chamber. They’ll smoulder away for many hours.

Always salt and dry your fish before you smoke it. This is important as it firms the surface of the fish and draws outward flavour-carrying particles from inside the flesh. These particles create colour and flavour when exposed to smoke.