Adult Toffee Apple

My thanks to Hattie Ellis, a food writer I'd never come across previously but whose recipe in The Apple Source Book (my how we laughed) was a winner this weekend. It it rare to come across something new and different that is both easy, quick (relatively) and utterly delicious. Her apple toffee pudding is all of those. 

I was looking for ways to use our bumper cooking apple crop, and this one fitted the bill perfectly, needing three large specimens. They are peeled, cored and chopped, then cooked with a little water until starting to soften nicely. I did this in the microwave in the dish destined for the oven later, with clingfilm over so they steamed. In a pan heat about 8oz of golden syrup, just warming it, then stir in 150g of white breadcrumbs and the zest of a lemon (carefully washed and abraded with kitchen paper to remove wax). Spread the sticky crumbs over the softened apple - I didn't get an even layer, and there were gaps, but never mind, next time I'd use a narrower dish. Into the oven already on (this is pretty forgiving as the oven started on very high as I'd been crisping crackling, then turned down to 180 degrees for this) and cook until the top was showing signs of crisping, about 20 minutes. The lemon (you could doubtless do without the zest but it would be a less noble dish) somehow made it seem slightly gingery, but the whole thing was excellent with Cornish vanilla ice cream. The sharp soft apple contrasted with the crisping sweet topping, the hot pud with the cold ice cream.

That Apple Source Book was bought to satisfy my curiosity about using different varieties for specific dishes, a load of writers contributing their suggestions. It helps if you can identify what apples you have.

We have two cooker trees, one the ubiquitous Bramley, the other an unidentified type inherited on our allotment yielding smaller but richer-tasting apples. Two mature trees produce a lot of apples in autumn, so finding ways to use them without repetition (hesitation and deviation?) is at the front of the culinary bit of my brain at present. Apple sauce, apple pie, apple crumble, apple tart, salads various, apples in porky stews, apples in instant relish... It's the courgette thing all over again. 

Autumn Plenty

Keeping my journal of costs of growing stuff against value of what is grown has opened my eyes a little to the plenty we enjoy at this time of year - early October that is. On Sunday we had a harvesting session at the allotment that yielded a load of cooking apples picked with our stick of ultimate power (a telescopic thing with grabby fingers and a bag beneath them for picking fruit from tall trees), beet, kohl rabi, parsley, beans various including a second flush of broad beans, destined for pretend hummus; loads of courgettes, two massive and as it turned out sweet parsnips (typically we are not sure which of the three types planted they are), Swiss chard and a real bonus, a small punnet of very ripe raspberries.

Those berries joined some apples in a pie that was a real treat. The beans and parsnips went with roast chicken, and the courgettes filled a quiche rich with cheese that we'll eat tonight with a sharp salad made from some of the other produce. Veg soup beckons too when the chicken carcase becomes stock.

For the value I tentatively put down £10 the lot, a bit on the conservative side. And I left out of my calculations a massive pumpkin (about 30lb I'd guess) that is now drying in the garden greenhouse, safe from - we hope - robbers and vagabonds. The latter had visited our allotment shed, and those of many neighbours, but only a hunting-style knife had gone from one of them as far as we know. Per the police they are looking for petrol driven tools and booze. Happily we had decided against keeping our fine wines in the allotment shed this year.

As similar gits nicked a friend's prize pumpkin a few years back we picked ours for safety. It will have a fitting end too, both decorative and culinary for our Halloween/Bonfire Night party. How many pumpkins here are just for show? A sad waste as the flesh bulks out stews sweetly, and makes a particularly thick custardy filling for pies. The little ones are best for cooking, but we'll do justice to the giant one when we feed friends at the firework gathering. Having seen Sainsbury's selling pumpkins a tenth the size for £3 I don't think £10 would be far off, though feeding friends is pretty much priceless.

Do Flavours Become Old?

My bedtime reading currently is Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book. Elizabethan and Jacobean recipes are set out in the original flexible spelling, then explained and commented on by the erudite Hilary Spurling. The seasonality of cooking is one thing that hits you - Mrs Spurling set it out by month - but also the flavours that the cook in those times most leaned on, some of which we use very little today.

Is this a matter of fashion, availability, or does taste evolve in some way perhaps to keep pace with technological change - the fridge and freezer, rapid transport - and the 'new' ingredients that become available?

I like to think I use a wide palette of spices and other flavour enhancers, but some things that were central to old Elinor's culinary world are pretty alien to mine - I wonder who nowadays really uses the cloves they buy, for example? Even in bread sauce I would use nutmeg in place of the overpowering clove. But at least I have a little bottleful in my cupboard whereas rosewater  is absent - I  had a bottle years ago and think it disappeared through a temporal warp vortex, as one day it was gone though I'd hardly used a drop. Rosewater for the Jacobean cook was the stock-cube of today's, which says a great deal about our loss of subtlety.

A myth should be debunked here: spices were probably not then used much if at all to mask meats etc going off, they were far too expensive to waste thus, and those with the money to spend on exotic ingredients would not have been foolish enough to endanger their health with rotting flesh, or desperate enough to have to. Spices were used to produce food that tasted good.

Our contemporary love of nutmeg and mace links us with those times, even moreso perhaps cinnamon. I very occasionally use Orange Flower Water too. Cloves have a flavour that I associate with the cooking of relatives long deceased. But it is not just spices that seem to fade away in cooking. Take raisins: in my Sixties and Seventies childhood they were included in curries, cakes and pies, covered in chocolate as a special treat to be eaten in the cinema, the tough little buggers eaten I'd estimate twice a week. I barely use them now, and have to buy them in specially when needed. Elinor Fettiplace seems to have employed them for every other dish. As my son loathes all dried fruit perhaps they will fade out of the culinary picture entirely when his generation pushes mine away from the hob.

We should not forget such ingredients, so I am going to make an effort to use the occasional clove, hide raisins - one 'receipt' in the book for chicken cooked in mutton broth has raisins (later sieved out) to add depth and sweetness for example - and buy rosewater too. In austerity terms these things should attract the cook for giving loads of taste for very little money - a single clove makes itself known in a big apple pie. More bang for your groat as it were.