Consuming Interest
Big Bad Bramleys
By ELIZABETH DAVID
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 lop 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, exceptionally heavily laden this year. Commer- 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 There are some who say they make wonderful fully with pheasant and other game birds and duck. At the Cordon Bleu school in Paris the size Bramleys, mixed lots of unidentified garden apples, sweet and sour, red, yellow, brown, green, large at any rate in the south, the trees appear to be 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 1! On the way to extinction owing to the short- 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 wonder- aromatically scented dessert apples which keep their shape arc essential. I have used those aforementioned unripe Cox's, which make good fried apples; better still, of course, if the apples cial crops of both eating and cooking apples baked apples. Not I. I find them too large, too believe there is no more chilling dish in the other day I saw the chef demonstrating quails 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 sightedness of the growers. sour and too collapsible; and in any case I are ripe. Both Eliza Acton—where fruit cooking , neatable—and her twentieth-century French scounterpart, Madame Saint-Ange,* are very in- sistent about the quality and ripeness of apples a;ainleys, probably because although they were i.t.ready known in her time (discovered, it is said, the (they were not commercially cultivated until Bramleys, cooking, but Miss Acton doesn't mention „e 1860s, some fifteen to twenty years after she Wrote Modern Cookery. ;18 a garden at Southwell in Nottinghamshire in 1a normande; roast quails served on a bed of Those Bramleys now. What to do with them? any and every kind is concerned she is un- and small, from old country gardens where, a couple of dozen out- ty LIVRE, 1927.) DE CUISINE DE MME. SMNT-ANGE. OLarou sse For apple jelly, for example, Miss Acton speci- fies 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 marmalade, 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; Bram- leys are our problem now (the apple publicity people tell me that there are three million Bram- ley 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 pre- pared and sliced apples into an oven pot, jar or casserole and bake them, covered, but en- tirely without water, sugar or anything else whatsover, 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, fol- lowing 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 arc 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 idiosyn- crasies 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.
More green tomatoes than one knows what to do with make another autumnal cooking worry created for their city friends by country people with gardens. Combine the apples and the green tomatoes to make chutney I will not; and that because there is a limit to the amount of green tomato chutney any one household can consume, and, in mine, that limit, is very rapidly reached. What I have found is that a sweet-sour tomato and orange mixture, more sweet than sour and more jam than chutney, disappears gratifyingly fast, possibly because it looks so decorative, but also, I think, because tastes have changed since the days when most of our traditional chutney recipes were evolved; too much strong vinegar and a large proportion of hot spices don't suit our palates any more, and are too overwhelming for present-day mild- cured meats such as the hams and gammons and salt beef with which such things are eaten.
Proportions for green tomato and orange chut- ney are: 2 lb. of tomatoes to 2 small oranges, 11 lb. of white sugar and pint of tarragon- flavoured wine or cider vinegar. With the sugar and vinegar you make a thin syrup and in this put the skinned and chopped tomatoes (green tomatoes are a nuisance to skin, and need to be left five minutes or so after you've poured boil- ing water over them; even so, you may have to take a sharp potato-parer to them) and the oranges, thinly sliced, skin and all, but with pips and ends discarded. Then simmer the mixture at a moderate pace, skimming from time to time, until it reaches setting point, which takes forty minutes to an hour, according to quantity.
Freakish though it may sound, I also rather like green tomatoes in a salad, mixed half and half with riper ones; sugar in the dressing is essential and so is the addition of a little finely sliced onion or shallot. This type of tomato salad sometimes mixed with a small proportion of shredded lettuce and/or sliced pickled cucum- ber, rings of raw sweet pept _ and a good deal of roughly cut parsley is evocative of Middle East- ern meals and often takes the place of a vegetable with grilled or fried meat and fish dishes.
A go-ahead organisation called French Farmers,t run by a young Englishwoman, Miss Patricia Green, and a Frenchman, M. Louis Vialard, who is also a wine producer, at Château Cissac in the Medoc, is responsible for the import of a good many French products which otherwise we wouldn't get. One of their cheeses worth looking out for is a Munster from Alsace, not entirely new to this country (Roche of Old Compton Street import the traditional large ones) but new in that it is now to be bought in a lb. size for about 2s. 6d. a box. Munster is a soft, creamy and powerfully flavoured cheese; and in good ripe condition I think one of the best of its kind; but it's hardly an everyday cheese, so it is encouraging to find that it does not appear to suffer, as do so many cheeses, from being made in miniatures; and in its native country Munster is always served accompanied by a little bowl of caraway or fennel seeds to sprinkle over it. There is, by the way, a Swiss imitation (of what is there not?) of Munster; in name only does it bear any resem- blance to the original. Another cheese brought over by French Farmers is Le Morinet, soft and rich but with a mild and mellow character, from the Brie country; I thought it good value at 4s. a box.
These products may not be generally available, and in advance I apologise to readers who may be irritated by not being able to lay hands on them; but good quality and good value products are often the ones not advertised, and it is only badgering by customers of buyers and retailers —and if necessary producing the names of the agents or importers—that makes shop- keepers ever get around to doing anything about supplying the wants of the minority. And another thing. Before it's too late, we have got to convince the French fruit and vegetable growers, dairy farmers and all food exporters that it isn't entirely necessary to deflavour, deodorise and debase their products before they can sell them on the English market.
t French Farmers Ltd. are at 17, Bentinck Street, WI (WELbeck 8508).
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