16th September 2025 - The Bramley apple

 Shopping this morning;  I had bought some Bramley apples for cooking to a puree. The assistant asked what did I do with the apples and I explained often I pureed them to eat with potato cakes, a German habit I think.  She didn't seem to know anything about apple crumble, welcome at this time of year with blackberries of course.  I realised suddenly that the old ways of cooking food really does differ in some parts of the country.

Okay I had a garden full of apples trees but in Somerset and the South-West many people had apple trees, we would put boxes of them outside the gate for people to help themselves at this time of the year.  But up here of course there are not so many gardens to be found on the steep slopes.

I was resentful to buy them from a supermarket but hardly likely to find apples for free round here, blackberries are of course different.  I went and pulled out a book, 'Dorothy Hartley's Food in England.  Where many apple recipes reside, not just with the Sunday roast pork, but even a version of potato cake with apple.  In this instance you turned mashed potatoes into patties then sandwiched them together with apple puree, adding at some stage sugar and butter.  Baked in a hot oven they were crisp on the outside with a buttery sweet sauce. 

This time of year there was also baked apples, the apple cored and then the hole stuffed with raisins and treacle poured down, so that the cooked apple sat very splodgy in a golden bed of treacle - just add cream;)

Bramley Tree Cottage - Alan Murray Rust, Geograph

Bramley cooking apple arrived on the scene in 1809 when a young girl planted a pip and it grew into a tree.  The 'mother' tree still survives in Nottinghamshire, and is being nursed back to health because of the honey fungus that has attached itself to it.  But the old tree still produces apples. A Wiki here explains its history. 

The cooking apple tree I grew was Russian, I think it was called 'white Transparent'.  You could pick the apples in late July and they fluffed up very similar to the Bramley when cooked.

At last it is raining, the rivers and becks are filling up with water, cascading down the hills in the Dales and of course flooding the roads - but we have water!  

As children this beautiful green and gold tin with its golden treacle was very inviting, but rather sickly sweet.  A spoonful was about enough.

Golden Syrup

Edit: Nothing to do with apples but Ironpolis of the Smell of Water has been visiting again, this time Brompton, near Northallerton.  The Bears of Brompton. 

Interesting fact: Scandinavian hogback stone monuments haven't been found in Scandinavia, a purely Northern English thing??