The Tracing Paper

The British are unusual in making a strict distinction between apples for eating - raw - and apples for cooking - though most of these can be happily eaten raw if stored for a few months.

Of all the varieties of cooking apple, the Bramley is by far the best known and loved, its tart flesh erupting into creamy fluff on cooking. The Bramley is a British culinary icon and particularly associated with Wisbech, in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where the large trees of old were traditionally underplanted with gooseberries (reported in the superb inventory of British foods, The Taste of Britain by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown).

The rich fenland around Wisbech still produces much fruit, though over 50% of the orchards have been lost since the 1930s. But hope is now at hand, with figures from the dunnhumby Academy at the University of Kent showing a 12.7% growth in sales in 2006. (dunnhumby run Tesco’s clubcard and the academy makes some of the vast database available to academics and food businesses.)

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