Apples

By Sara Paston-Williams

Information on apples for every occasion, covering dessert, cooking and cider

varieties. Delicious recipes on everything from apple crumble to making cider.

Packed with practical advice on growing and picking your own apples. Everyone

wants to eat local, home-grown fruit and vegetables and this helpful guide is a

wonderful sourcebook of the quintessential English fruit – the apple. Covering a

range of apple varieties that can be found growing in the orchards of the British

countryside, the book covers a wide range of dessert apples, cooking apples

and cider apples. Information on each variety includes a general description of

shape and colour for easy recognition, and, of course, a description of the taste.

Recipes and culinary suggestions are given throughout the book, and include

everything from apple crumble to making your own cider. Fairy tales, history

and folklore appears throughout, demonstrating how this humble fruit is central

to our culinary heritage. The book is packed with practical advice on how to

grow and pick your own apples, from choosing apple trees to planting and

attracting wildlife into your orchard, alongside information on harvesting and

storing your crop.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909881129

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

‘No fruit is more to our English taste than the Apple’

Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert (1929)

My inspiration for writing this book was meeting apple enthusiast Celia Steven, the great grand-daughter of nurseryman Henry Merryweather, who first grew the Bramley’s Seedling commercially. The most famous cooker in the world celebrates its 200th birthday in 2009 (see www.bramleyapples.co.uk) and I wanted to pay tribute by encouraging more people to discover the pleasures of home-grown, well-favoured English apples.

The apple is more firmly rooted in our history and culture than any other fruit, yet only 20 per cent of the apples sold in the UK are grown here and two-thirds of our commercial orchards have been destroyed since 1960, putting our own growers out of business and incurring more food miles, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. The British have a terrific heritage of growers who developed varieties, such as Laxton’s Superb and Worcester Pearmain, for great taste rather than high yield or looks. Our cool climate means smaller harvests, but this is no bad thing. The apples spend a long time on the tree growing slowly, so even fairly bland varieties like Gala or Braeburn taste better grown here, while other more traditional varieties taste magnificent.

Twenty years ago, apart from that old trooper the Cox’s Orange Pippin, you would have been lucky to find anything other than Golden Delicious or Granny Smith in the shops. The supermarkets drove down prices with cheap imports of these dull apples, but customers’ recent demand for flavour and crunch has persuaded them to do a U-turn on British apples and commercial UK growers are pulling up their socks with a hefty reduction in chemical spraying.

First promoted by Marks and Spencers, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, named British apples are now available nationwide. Tesco has recently promised to double the amount of UK apples its supermarkets sell within three years. Waitrose says that more than 70 per cent of its apples are home-grown, while Booth’s in the North of England sell rare-breed varieties from local orchards. The Co-op has joined the Prince of Wales in planting hundreds of acres of named British apple varieties to be made into ‘heritage’ apple juice in the future. Sales figures show that even if some varieties are available for only a few weeks, people still want to buy them. There has been no looking back: although there is still a long way to go to regain the richness of our apple heritage.

The National Trust has done, and is doing, a huge amount to help. Many of their properties and tenants have restored old orchards and planted anew with local apple varieties. Some make cider and apple juice and many celebrate Apple Days. The Trust can even claim the living descendant of the apple tree, believed to be Flower of Kent, which is thought to have inspired Sir Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity in 1665. The tree, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, has become something of a shrine to Newton.

I am lucky to live in the West Country where a thriving apple culture stretches back into the past. People still feel passionate about this most versatile of fruits – my own village has just planted a community orchard and there are many other similar schemes. Apples work well with meat, fish, cheese, vegetables and salads, in pies, puds and refreshing cordials. The idea of using a succession of varieties – from the light summer apples through to the richer autumn and winter kinds and finally to those that must be carefully stored until they reach maturity in early spring – has almost disappeared, but using distinct varieties can add a whole new dimension of flavours to familiar dishes. As the well-known nurseryman and apple connoisseur Edward Bunyard said, ‘apple flavour is as varied as the scents of flowers’.

A BRIEF HISTORY

Our fruit-bowl apple originated from trees that still grow wild in Kazakhstan’s Tien Shan Mountains (the word ‘Kazak’ means ‘Father Apple’). When farming began – in about 8000BC in the Middle East – wild apples were transplanted to grow among other crops and rapidly spread across Asia. Eventually, the Babylonians discovered the secret of grafting, making possible the cultivation of favoured apples.

Apples probably arrived in Britain via the Romans whose empire stretched east and included many apple orchards that had been carefully tended by the Persians and Hittites for thousands of years. As far as we know, only sour crab apple grew here before then and the Romans were keen apple-eaters. During the invasion, the soldiers were given land to farm and orchards were planted as an inducement to stay. The trees they brought over from Gaul thrived so wonderfully in places like Devon and Somerset that gourmets of the ancient world soon looked upon English apples as the finest to be had.

As the Roman Empire fell, orchards were abandoned and Britain was overrun by succeeding hordes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. During these Dark Ages, orchards survived mainly in the monasteries where their apples were juiced for cider. Another invasion, this time by the Normans, saw new impetus in the cultivation of apples in Britain, as they had a long tradition of apple growing and cider-making and brought their techniques with them.

By the end of the 13th century a number of choice varieties were established, including two still known today: the Pearmain, which was the favourite eating apple right up to the 18th century; and the Costard, which gave us the word ‘costermonger’ (originally meaning a seller of Costard apples), which remained popular for pies until Shakespeare’s time.

Landowners were ready to pay for specialist grafts for better-tasting fruit and, by the 15th century, a final fruit course, largely featuring apples, was the standard end to a rich man’s dinner.

THE FIRST COMMERCIAL ORCHARD

When Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534, he exerted his princely power by ordering apple planting on a vast scale and sending his chief fruiterer, Richard Harris, to France to bring back new varieties, especially the newly fashionable Pippin (the word ‘pippin’ just means ‘seedling’, from the action of planting a seed, as in ‘pip-in’). The rich, made even richer by the dissolution of the monasteries, filled their gardens with these new apples and Henry set up the first commercial orchard in Kent, still Britain’s most important commercial apple-growing area, to supply them with trees.

The Stuarts accelerated the trend and John Tradescant, Charles I’s gardener, travelled as far as Russia to bring back new varieties. By 1629 there were about 60 grown in Britain and apples were used in all manner of dishes. The Puritans, especially, encouraged market gardening and Cromwell sent out emissaries to order every landowner to plant fruit trees.

Following the restoration of Charles II in 1660, agricultural prices declined and landowners, farmers and smallholders looked for other income. One source was apple growing, setting the pattern across the country until the early 20th century. When William of Orange took over the throne with Mary and his entourage, the Dutch skill in apple growing came as part of their cultural baggage. So in love with apples had