Apple, marjoram and ricotta cake with burnt honey glaze
The first in a series of posts linked to each month's recipe column for Suffolk News.
Last week I chose an apple from a box of windfalls left on a street in my town. The apple I chose was perfect, with a leafy stem still attached. I walked home holding it in my hand, and people smiled at it. I think that apple put a spring in my step. One person in a bookshop commented: “that’s a beauty!” It was, and it made me happy. Try going for a walk with an apple in your hand.
Having written my recipe column and taken an apple for a walk, my autumn resolution is to reclaim the apple as a treat. This is a fruit whose availability year-round has made it feel prosaic, and I have been taking it for granted.
This month’s food column has a recipe for an apple, ricotta and marjoram cake with a burnt honey glaze. I tested it with several different kinds of honey and marjoram grown at different times of the year to discover that the best flavour comes from marjoram picked before it flowers. The leaves can be too pungent after flowering. It’s always a gamble developing cake recipes using fresh herbs because their strength does vary from garden to garden and place to place- it is very much a matter of individual judgement despite the quantities suggested by a recipe.
The column is about over-familiarity, nostalgia and loss too. Apples always get to me (I wrote about my platonic appley-ideal). The South Suffolk apple orchards of my youth are no more, and my grandparents are gone, as is the little orchard at the bottom of their garden. We have only two russet apple trees grafted onto dwarfing rootstocks planted on our allotment, and I have to walk quite a way to see them.
Reading and reference list:
When I went to Hay-On-Wye last August, I swiftly grew over-stimulated by the number of bookshops (which I thought I’d find heavenly and…did not). I ended up feeling so exhausted by choice that I failed to buy the one book I really wanted because I just couldn’t face going into another shop. So I acquired it from said shop’s online stock a few months later.
The Welsh Marches Pomona is written by Michael Porter, a well-regarded local pomologist and illustrated by Margaret Gill, the accomplished botanical illustrator. Useful if you want to identify the 31 types of eating and cooking apples not represented in Brogdale’s National Fruit Collection, it was published by the Marcher Apple Network (MAN) All the varieties in the book have been planted in the new Paramor Orchard established by MAN near Crickhowell in Powys. Roseanne Saunders’s The English Apple is similarly beautiful to look at and read, as is Caroline Balls’s Heritage Apples.
Pete Brown’s The Apple Orchard; The story of our most English fruit kicks off with a bucolic wander around an Arthurian apple orchard where he experiences an anaphylactic reaction to a cider apple. For Brown, "the apple really is the forbidden fruit”. It ends with an affectionate homage to the ancient custom of wassailing, where noise rather than light seeks to penetrate the darkness of a Somerset orchard in midwinter. There’s an excellent bibliography too. And talking of Somerset, James Rich’s family own a cider apple orchard there, although in Apple: Recipes from the orchard, he uses many different varieties.
“And then there is that day when all around,
all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one
by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there,
and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and
twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs
in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the
tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from
your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long
before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever
was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below,
You will fall in darkness...”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
The origins of Apple Day, East of England Apple Orchard Project Apple Day events and some National Trust Apple Day events for 2022.
A quick way to identify your apple.
“Many pious Englishmen shared Austen’s moral disdain for the “wild” ungrafted apple tree, and in that peculiarly Calvinist way, they believed that they might find in the condition of a man’s orchard evidence of his spiritual fate,” writes professor William Kerrigan about Ralph Austen’s Spiritual use of an Apple Orchard. Clearly, my spiritual fate has boarded a downbound train because I love them the best. I make a mental note of the location of every ‘wild’ apple tree I find (yesterday’s spot was a tree heavy with small red apples on the A14 westwards past Cambridge) and frequently stop to sample their fruit.
Dolly understands the nostalgia to be found in an apple.
And Sonny Boy Williamson thinks “yo' apple's awful fine.”
I enjoyed this piece by Gary Paul Nabhan in Orion Magazine about the ‘wild apple forests of Kazakhstan and the man who has devoted his life to studying locating and preserving wild apple species in his homeland.
In Kenya, the apple is an exotic fruit. Efforts are being made to grow them there. Orchards of homegrown apples can be found across Egypt, Morocco, Southwest Cameroon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Libya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, Madagascar, Algeria, Tunisia, DR Congo, South Africa, Rwanda, and Zambia. it is a myth that apples cannot be grown on the continent of Africa.
In ‘Death of a Pig’, EB White buried his favourite hog under a wild apple tree; a single green apple fell into the grave as it was dug.
Pete Brown’s book reminds me to try not to complain about cold weather because the apple likes it. The poet Robert Frost says as much in Good-by and Keep Cold:
“No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
Apples & People is an extraordinary collection of stories gathered over 28 months between January 2021 and May 2023, which are released on key dates of an apple’s own calendar. From the story of the Apple Records label and the Ganges-adjacent apple sniffers to Yosuke Amemiya’s search for the Universal Apple, every single entry is a joy.
I love this kid’s book: A life cycle, both human and apple, in Zoe Hall’s The Apple Pie Tree.
“An apple pie is easy to make…if the market is open. But if the market is closed, the world becomes your grocery store,” in Marjorie Priceman’s How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. Also, a useful way to introduce age-appropriate discussions about seasonality and the effects of economic globalism on food supplies.
Returning to the idea of taking apples for granted, Odd Apples by William Mulan is a direct challenge to this. You’ll see them in all their idiosyncratic, technicolour glory. Here’s a Grubstreet feature about the book and its author.
“I learned to wait on the apple.” The film clip above reminded me of my grandfather, who would start the ritual known as ‘Fruit’ at eight pm every evening. On his lap would be a brown paper bag, a small clasp knife, and a selection of fruit. He would begin with the apple, peeling it slowly before deftly cutting slices which he would offer to us in turn.
“Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. A farmer pauses in the doorway of his barn and he is wearing the right boots. A sheep stands under an apple tree and it wears the right look, and the tree is hung with puckered frozen fruit of the right color.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White
A precious gift of apples. My Palestinian friend, as we drove from Ramallah to Haifa, handed me a paper bag. "We went to the Golan Heights... (now occupied)... and we picked these apples." Yellow and sweet.
Love this new column!