Celebrate seasonal British-grown produce with four easy dishes guided by a natural ingredient in its prime

Early autumn is one of the most generous and comforting times of year to cook with British produce: sweetcorn is at its peak, squash begins to sweeten as the weather cools and bitter leaves such as radicchio provide balance to the season’s abundance. Today’s recipes are simple celebrations of British ingredients, using just a handful of carefully chosen components to let each vegetable shine. Whether it’s a buttery cheese tart for sharing; a fresh, herby corn salad; sweet roast squash with warm, spicy ’nduja; or bitter leaves lifted with a floral dressing, they all rely on cooking with ingredients at their seasonal peak and allowing nature to guide the menu.

A pleasingly proper curry-filled pie with a zingy chutney to go with it

This is one of my all-time favourite pies, pie born out of the Midlands. While studying at University College Birmingham, the now head of department at the college of food there, Lewis Walker, and I were in digs together and regularly ended up in very late-night balti houses after big nights out. These pies remind me of that really special time. It wasn’t much before my university days when balti cooking emerged in 1970s Birmingham, apparently created as a way to appease the British palate of the time. Its roots are in Pakistani-Kashmiri cooking and the base of the curry always has to contain tomatoes, onions, peppers and chillies, although variations can be built on those foundations. They’re a wonderful celebration of multicultural Britain.

This fantastic tart is a minor miracle invented by a legendary chef, yet it has very few ingredients and an intriguing technique for baking it

Often, the greatest dishes are made from very few ingredients and with pretty standard techniques, and this tart is one of them. It’s based on an old Frédy Girardet recipe that, despite his reputation as one of the all-time greats, calls only for a simple application of process to deliver a knockout result (which is one reason I put it in my latest book). A pastry case is spread with sugar and cream, then dotted with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon. The pastry is not blind baked, but filled and baked in a very hot oven. That sounds wrong, but it is not: a fierce heat is needed to bake the pastry under its filling and to meld the cream, sugar and butter. A pinch of flour is mixed with the sugar and, as it all boils up, that smidgen of flour holds everything together as it bubbles and reduces until it takes on the appearance of condensed milk while the pastry cooks and toasts at the edges. I still use Girardet’s quantities because, unsurprisingly, they work perfectly. Merci, chef.

Henry Harris is chef/co-owner of Bouchon Racine, London EC1. His book, The Racine Effect, is published by Quadrille at £40. To order a copy for £36, go to guardianbookshop.com