From where I am sitting it looks very much as if this were another apple-glut autumn, like that of 1960. No question here of ‘at the top of the house the apples are laid in rows’; they are in bowls and baskets, under the stairs and in the passage and on the kitchen dresser; spotty windfalls, a couple of dozen outsize Bramleys, mixed lots of unidentified garden apples, sweet and sour, red, yellow, brown, green, large and small, from old country gardens where, at any rate in the south, the trees appear to be exceptionally heavily laden this year. Commercial crops of both eating and cooking apples are, I am told, no more than average and, like all our crops this year, have ripened at least a month late; not that that excuses those growers who send their Cox’s orange pippins as unripe to market as some I’ve tasted recently and which make one wonder if the reputation of yet another of our cherished home-grown products is on the way to extinction owing to the short-sightedness of the growers.
Those Bramleys now. What to do with them? There are some who say they make wonderful baked apples. Not I. I find them too large, too sour and too collapsible; and in any case I believe there is no more chilling dish in the whole repertory of English cooking than those baked apples with their mackintosh skins and the inevitable fibrous little bits of core left in the centre; and again, because of the way they disintegrate Bramleys are of very little use for the kind of apple dishes which go so wonderfully with pheasant and other game birds and duck. At the Cordon Bleu school in Paris the other day I saw the chef demonstrating quails à la normande; roast quails served on a bed of sliced apples, cooked in butter in a sauté pan; they were seasoned with salt and sugar, enriched with thick bubbling cream and a good measure of calvados. Delicious; but well-flavoured and aromatically scented dessert apples which keep their shape are essential. I have used those aforementioned unripe Cox’s, which make good fried apples; better still, of course, if the apples are ripe. Both Eliza Acton – where fruit cooking of any and every kind is concerned she is unbeatable – and her twentieth-century French counterpart, Madame Saint-Ange,1 are very insistent about the quality and ripeness of apples for cooking, but Miss Acton doesn’t mention Bramleys, probably because although they were already known in her time (discovered, it is said, in a garden at Southwell in Nottinghamshire in 1805) they were not commercially cultivated until the 1860s, some fifteen to twenty years after she wrote Modern Cookery.
For apple jelly, for example, Miss Acton specifies Nonsuch, Ribstone pippins and Pearmains, or a mixture of two or three such varieties; and for that most elementary of nursery dishes – which can be such a comfort if nicely made and so odious if watery or over-stewed – which we call a purée and the French call a marmelade, Madame Saint-Ange demands, as do nearly all French cooks, the sweet apples they call reinettes, the pippins of which the old-fashioned russet-brown reinette grise is the prototype.
All these are counsels of perfection; Bramleys are our problem now (the apple publicity people tell me that there are three million Bramley trees in England today), so with Bramleys I make my apple purée, and the recipe I use is the one Miss Acton gives for apple sauce. There is nothing much to it except the preparation. Every scrap of peel and core must be most meticulously removed because the purée is not going to be sieved. You simply heap the prepared and sliced apples into an oven pot, jar or casserole and bake them, covered, but entirely without water, sugar or anything else whatsoever, in a very moderate oven (gas no. 3,330°F) for anything from twenty to thirty minutes. To whisk them into a purée is then the work of less than a minute. You add sugar (according to your taste and whether the purée is to serve as a sauce or a sweet dish) and, following Miss Acton’s instructions, a little lump of butter. I think perhaps this final addition provides the clue to the excellence of this recipe, and if it sounds dull to suggest the plainest of apple purées (cream and extra sugar – Barbados brown for preference – go on the table with it) as a sweet dish I can only say that there are times when one positively craves for something totally unsensational; the meals in which every dish is an attempted or even a successful tour de force are always a bit of a trial.
And how grateful hospital patients would be if such a thing as a good apple purée were ever to be produced in these establishments; it is just the kind of food one needs when not too ill to be interested in eating, but not well enough to face typical hospital or nursing-home cooking.
One point I should add for the benefit of anyone who has no experience of the idiosyncrasies of the Bramley apple: after fifteen minutes the slices may appear nowhere near cooked; five minutes later you find that they have burst into a froth which has spilled all over the oven; so it is advisable to fill your dish no more than half-full to start with.
The Spectator, 26 October 1962
*
The title of this article was less than fortunate. The English Apple and Pear Board which in the person of Robert Carrier, its PR representative, had helped me with information, was not amused. A lady from Todmorden in Lancashire wrote to my editor in ferocious terms about his cookery expert, furiously condemning ‘the revolting brown jam-like apology for the real thing’ which my Eliza Acton recipe would certainly produce. When some cherished culinary tenet comes under attack from a journalist people do write letters like that. As a matter of fact I had been a bit surprised myself when I opened my Friday Spectator that week. I had not been conscious of launching a deliberate attack on the Bramley. It can only have been my unflattering remarks about English baked apples – a criticism directed at the method of cooking rather than at the object cooked – which prompted the literary editor or his deputy to give my otherwise fairly mild piece so provocative a title. In weekly journalism naming of articles tends to be rather a last minute affair, so when my proof came in there had naturally not been any hint of bad about my big Bramleys. Anyway, the deed was done, and having apologised as best I could to Robert Carrier, I began to think the little commotion had been rather entertaining. In my household, I regret to say, Bramleys had already become forever big and bad.
The lady from Todmorden, I should add, on receiving a letter from me explaining that the titles of my articles were beyond my control, wrote to me again, in a kindly and friendly way. It had never occurred to her, she said, that feature writers did not give their own titles to the articles they wrote. What a worry it must be, she thought, what with possible misprints, etc. to be a writer. If only those were the only hazards of the trade…
I think it may be of interest to record what my correspondent, a Mrs Dorothy Sutcliffe, had to say about the correct way to produce ‘a heavenly fluffy mound of translucent ambrosia which is obtainable only by using Bramleys (no others will do). Put your sliced apples, about 1 lb, in a pan on a good heat, boil up rapidly with a dessertspoon of water and about 3–4 oz of granulated sugar, stirring as you go, and there you are. Easy as pie’. Mrs Sutcliffe also told me that she ‘would not consider apple Charlotte, apple Betty, Eve’s pudding, or the famous North Country apple pie worth the effort if made with anything other than Bramley apples’. Good Big Bramleys then? But what apple did they use in the North before the birth of the Bramley?
1. Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme Saint-Ange (Larousse, 1927).