Although apples, pears and quinces have flourished as far afield as India and Persia, most of us have always associated them with the English country garden. Tom Norrington-Davies urges us to explore their versatility and to try some of our wonderful lesser-known varieties.
Have you ever been a long way from home and stumbled upon Little Britain? I’m not talking about Vicky ‘yeah but no but’ Pollard’s Little Britain. Rather, one of those corners of the planet where pillar boxes and gaiety theatres look like they have been briefly abducted by aliens and politely put back – only in the wrong place. Shimla, in the Indian Himalayas, fits this description. The culprits were not little green men but the Brits themselves, who made it their summer capital in the days of the Raj.
Ascending from the intense heat of the Punjab on a narrow gauge railway, it is easy to see why the colonialists fled Calcutta when the temperatures soared. Aside from everything looking totally otherworldly, the air at 8,000 feet is fresh to the point of being narcotic. And one chilly November, when I last visited, that air was strongly perfumed with something I couldn’t place my finger on until I sawbaskets and baskets of them littered all over the bus depot: pink, ripe apples.
Whether lined up neatly in an orchard or lurking at the end of a garden, the apple tree looks like part of the furniture of rural England. In fact, this fruit, along with its cousins the pear and the quince, is closer to home on the sub-continent. Persia (modern-day Iran) is probably the birthplace to a primitive form of all three. Apples – crab apples – were brought to the UK by the Romans. The apples took to the climate and we took to them, but it was the Edwardians who were masters of cross-breeding, producing hundreds of varieties with peculiar names and brilliant flavours. The French did the same, but it could be argued that the pear is their true love.
Quinces will grow where pears and apples do, but unless you own a tree, the chances are you will eat imported fruit. Every autumn, the first shop in my neighbourhood to carry quinces is the Turkish greengrocer. I love quinces. I wish we ate more here, then maybe we would grow more. The Italians call the quince mela cotogna – cooking apple (try eating one raw and you’ll know why). Indeed, if you want to add sparkle to a dish requiring cooking apples, swap in quinces. They lend a sweet/sour jamminess to apple and pear dishes. More than this, when quinces cook they blush, turning the flesh and juices a dusty rose-pink.
Now is the best time to buy apples, pears and quinces. Indeed, you will only find quinces in the shops between September and the new year. So it once was with apples and pears, but their popularity has founded a global industry. Out of our season, the fruits are likely to come from the southern hemisphere; during it, there is no guarantee that fruit will be local. As usual, the lucrative fruit market is being bullied into uniformity by the same old big businesses. Do they have to spoil everything?
I mentioned the myriad varieties of apple and pear (over 3,000 named ones), each with their own flavour and texture. We are in danger of forgetting them; worse still of losing them entirely. This autumn, support small orchards by eschewing the Cox’s, Bramleys and Golden Delicious apples for something you haven’t tried before. Some supermarkets are championing the rarer breeds as they come into season, but visiting farm shops and orchards will be a real education.
I have devised the recipes below so that each can be adapted to apple, pear or quince. Some are a mix of all three, but don’t be put off trying them if you have to improvise with two fruits, or even one.