The Tracing Paper

Discovery apples, a taste of August

Around the middle of August, the first English apples of the season start ripening. It’s time for a joyous rediscovery of the astonishing diversity of British apples, with a succession of varieties harvested between now and December.

First of the season: Discovery apples

Discovery is the earliest main commercial variety, ready for picking in mid-August and on sale almost immediately. Find them at markets, in greengrocers and the more enlightened supermarkets.

For a brief few weeks, these green and red flushed apples are the best around, deliciously juicy, crunchy and aromatic. As a summer apple, it is perhaps appropriate that there’s a hint of strawberry about the flavour. They don’t cook particularly well but are sublimely delicious eaten simply raw, pair well with soft fruit in a fruit salad and make good juice.

The earliest apples

According to leading top fruit marketer, Norman Collett, this year’s early summer heatwave brought forward the start of the Discovery harvest, with the very first apples on sale at Tesco’s Pembury store on Tuesday 24th July. Discoveries went on sale across Kent on 3rd August and nationwide a week later.

Not for storage

Unlike some later varieties, such as the Cox’s Orange Pippin, the Discovery is best eaten soon after harvest and only becomes soft and tasteless if stored for more than a week.

Many of the later varieties store well enough to be enjoyed as late as March, but only cookers like the Bramley are good throughout the year.

A recent heritage

The Discovery is a relatively new addition to the hundreds of varieties of apple grown in Britain (the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale has 1,882 varieties, from ADW Atkins to Zomer Delicious) but venerable in the company of other commercially grown apples.

Discovery’s origins

Essex farmworker, Mr Dummer, of Langham, near Colchester in Essex, raised the very first Discovery seedling in 1949, probably from the pip of a Worcester Pearmain, crossed with Beauty of Bath. (Apples: from Kyrgyzstan to the East of England describes how the genetic diversity of apples is such that the seedling of any pip is effectively a new variety.) According to the excellent East of England Apples and Pears Project, the original tree still survives.

Legend has it that, having only one arm, he asked his wife to help plant out the young seedlings, but she slipped and broke her ankle. The seedling was left lying on the ground, protected only by some sacking, but somehow survived. Dummer recognised the qualities of the new apple: ripening early like its parent the Worcester Pearmain, resistance to disease and late frosts, a tendency not to drop and better storing potential than other early apples. Continue Reading »

What was in season 146 years ago? Here’s Mrs Beeton’s list of Things in Season in April (each food links to a search of food bloggers’ thoughts and recipes).

Fish

• Brill
• Carp
• Cockles
• Crabs
• Dory
• Flounders
• Ling
• Lobsters
• Red mullet
• Gray mullet
• Mussels
• Oyster
• Perch
• Prawns
• Salmon
• Shad
• Shrimps
• Skate
• Smelts
• Soles
• Tench
• Turbot

Meat

• Beef
• Lamb
• Mutton
• Veal

Poultry

• Chickens
• Ducklings
• Fowls
• Leverets
• Pigeons
• Pullets
• Rabbits

Game

• Hares

Vegetables

• Broccoli
• Celery
• Lettuces
• Young onions
• Parsnips
• Radishes
• Small salad
• Sea kale
• Spinach
• Sprouts
• Various herbs

Fruit

• Apples
• Nuts
• Pears
• Forced cherries
• Rhubarb
• Diced fruits
• Crystallized preserves

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(Source - Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management 1861 - Mrs Beeton on amazon.com
/ amazon.co.uk)

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Sometimes the simplest words turn out to hide concepts of thorny complexity. Putting together my seasonal food cloud for April, I struggled with the question of whether to include Mediterranean oranges.

Oranges are one of the joys of winter and early spring, especially the peculiarly sharp sweetness of Sicilian blood oranges. But should they really be called seasonal here in England, hundreds of miles from the citrus groves of the Mediterranean?

Our idea of seasonality is closely tied to the concept of local. After all, just as all news is local - somewhere - so every basic foodstuff is local somewhere. (A lot of processed food, combining globally sourced ingredients, can hardly be said to be local anywhere.) And all fresh food must be more or less in season somewhere. (But only more or less, since modern production and storage methods have stretched the seasonal limits of many foods, providing English strawberries in December and New Zealand apples in October.)

After decades of increasing globalisation of food supply, local (and seasonal) food is enjoying a long overdue revival. Local food can be fresher, more sustainably produced, culturally richer and tastier - especially when its at the peak of its season. But not all local food is good food, nor is all good food local. Winter would be bleaker without those Mediterranean oranges, life poorer without chocolate and mornings near impossible without coffee. Continue Reading »

Seasonal food cloud for April (, 513k) - now available to download for easy reference and printing. Ideal for your fridge, noticeboard or back pocket!

Seasonal food can’t be bettered - it’s fresher, tastier, often more local and cheaper.

The supermarkets may have tried their hardest to break our relationship with the seasons, offering every type of food all year round, but seasonality is enjoying something of a revival. Air-freighted Peruvian asparagus, hot-house strawberries and Australian Brussels sprouts in July (spotted last year in Sainsbury’s) just don’t compare. Continue Reading »

March in England and the peach seems an impossibly distant and exotic fruit, its heady summer aroma almost unimaginable. Out of season peaches always disappoint and the sickly syrupy sweetness of the tinned fruit is altogether different.

But late March in Suffolk and peach trees, most of them tight against a south-facing wall for warmth, are in bloom. After the modest white blossom of the early flowering cherry plum, the lurid pink of the peach is a herald of the nectar sweet summer fruit.

The peach, Prunus persica, has been cultivated in Mediterranean Europe for thousands of years. Once thought to be of Persian origin, it’s now known to be native to China. Even so, it produces superb fruit in favourable conditions even as far north as England.

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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