The ripe stuff
We picked our first Beauty of Bath a few weeks ago. This variety, more than any other, reminds me of my childhood. As children, we knew exactly where the best apples were and where to clamber over the wall into our neighbour’s orchard. My first bite of that bittersweet apple with its red and yellow speckled skin brought memories flooding back.
Grenadier is the earliest cooker to ripen. We have already had some grenadier apple sauce with some of our succulent roast pork. The pigs are Saddleback and Tamworth, crossed with red Duroc. The flavour of the meat from these happy, lazy pigs is sublime. The pigs adore snuffling around under the apple trees to find windfalls - we joke that they then come with built-in apple sauce.
But what to do with the surplus apples? I’m always desperate to store some Brambly apples for winter tarts and pies. This year I have plans to spread them in a single layer on fruit trays in a cool shed. We’ll stack the recycled boxes so the air can circulate. I’m racking my brains to try to remember how it was done years ago “in life before electricity”. Perhaps some of the readers can share their tips with me.
I certainly remember our old gardener, Pad, digging a long, shallow pit to store cooking apples. I seem to recollect that the pit was lined with straw and then covered with a good layer of soil then covered with an old mat.
Nowadays, almost everyone has a freezer, so make as much stewed or apple puree as you can manage. It can be used not only for sauce but also in crumbles and tarts in winter. The flavour is immeasurably better than the under-mature Brambly in the shops.
Apple juice is another option. You’ll need to buy a centrifuge - Krups, Magimix, Kenwood and other manufacturers have models worth investing in (you can also use the centrifuge to make a variety of other fruit and vegetable juices).
Chutneys are another delicious way of preserving surplus fruit and vegetables.
Plums, greengages or pears poached in a sweet geranium, or even a simple syrup, are delicious and freeze brilliantly - a terrific standby pudding to have in the freezer. Store them in smallish plastic tubs so that they can be defrosted easily.
Meanwhile, feast on as many apples, plums and pears as you can for breakfast, lunch and dinner and build up your stock of vitamins to guard against winter colds. Remember the old adage: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
