Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 8

When my father took on the tenancy of Riverford after the Second World War, he was advised that the cider would pay the rent. The tenancy combined three small Church of England farms and each had its own mill for crushing the apples and press for extracting the juice. As the nation turned to beer and then wine, the orchards surrounding the farms progressively contracted, fell into ruin and were, for the most part, grubbed out in favour of more profitable crops. As children, we earned our pocket money in autumn by gathering the apples from the remaining trees for delivery to Hills Cider, the one surviving press in the parish. Orchards were made up of dozens of different local varieties, with glorious names like Pig’s Nose, Slack ma Girdle, Tommy Knight and Plympton Pippin. Most of these were ‘uck and spits’ – too bitter and high in tannin to be fit for anything but the press. After weeks of labour interspersed with apple fights, the hessian sacks were hauled to the cider works. While the apples were weighed and unloaded, musty-smelling men in leather aprons delighted in plying us with last year’s cider in the cool semi-dark of the barns, surrounded by rows of the 120-gallon wooden barrels used to mature the cider.

Today even Hills has gone. The cider works have been converted into dwellings that financed the emigration of the last of the Hills family cidermakers to Australia. There is a renaissance of cider and juice-making amongst a new breed of enthusiasts, alongside the boosting of mainstream cider brands by some clever marketing as ‘over ice’ drinks. There has even been some replanting of orchards in Somerset to meet this new demand. Growing cider apples is relatively easy because you are not constrained by specifications of size and cosmetic perfection; the odd bug and blemish all go to make up the brew. Producing dessert fruit is another matter.

The southwest of England, with its mild, damp, maritime climate, has never been a good area for table fruit; the persistent humidity makes the trees susceptible to fungal diseases that sap vigour and hence yield. The main production areas in the UK are in the southeast: Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and, to a lesser extent, Hereford and Worcester.

Even in these areas it is very difficult to produce an economically viable yield of fruit that is acceptable to a buying public whose eyes have been trained by supermarket displays of cosmetic perfection. Despite numerous attempts to develop more holistic, less intrusive approaches, even most organic growers resort to regular sprays of sulphur and sometimes copper oxychloride (allowed under organic rules) to control fungal disease. As Paul Ward, our most successful UK apple grower says, ‘It’s a flawed system, but a good bit less flawed than the non-organic one.’ Even Jeremy Saunders, perhaps our most determinedly idealistic supplier, growing on a sunny southern slope in the most favoured part of Devon and combining fruit with chickens ranging underneath, has found that he cannot make a living without regular spraying. As things stand at the moment it is either pragmatic compromise or imports, so we go with the compromise.

Despite the nation’s professed enthusiasm for heritage varieties and local food, the stark reality for most commercial producers is that if it is not nigh on perfect in appearance, it will not sell. Pile a fruit bowl with a mixture of fruit of different grades and I guarantee that, unless your household is starving, or made up of hardcore eco-warriors, any blemished specimens will be left to wither at the bottom. That is why there are so few orchards left in the UK and why the huge majority of our fruit, organic or not, is imported. Pears, being early flowering and hence susceptible to frosts, are possibly even more difficult to grow commercially in the UK than apples. Plums and damsons fare a little better but are still going the same way as apples. Our native varieties, many of which produce plums of great flavour but poor shelf life, are again being slowly forced out by the more reliable, huge plums on steroids, mainly from Spain that have a longer shelf life.

The apple varieties that combine eating quality with a reasonable degree of disease resistance and suitability to our climate are (in rough order of maturity): Discovery, Early Windsor, Red Windsor, Worcester, Falstaff, some Russets, Cox (probably the most difficult to grow), Red Pippin and Spartan. The Dutch do well with Elstar, which tastes very similar to Cox and is a good keeper but much easier to grow. The only hope of growing quality fruit without copper and sulphur (the Holy Grail for all committed top fruit producers) is through using modern varieties, and there are now some very promising ones coming from Eastern Europe (Evita and Colina), France (Cox Royal – a Cox cross) and the USA (Crimson Crisp).

Apples vary hugely in their keeping qualities. Some late-cropping varieties such as Russets will improve in store and can be kept successfully in ambient conditions until Christmas, but generally the commercial practice is to keep fruit in cold storage at 1°C and high humidity. Fruit stored beyond January will normally also have the benefit of controlled or modified atmosphere storage. This means the apples are kept in a sealed store, where the oxygen levels are reduced and CO2 levels rise as the fruit respires. The idea is to put them to sleep without killing them and, just like anaesthesia, it requires careful monitoring and control to avoid disaster. If all goes well, the reduction in the respiration rate of the fruit can double or even treble shelf life. It is even possible to hold some varieties in reasonable condition right through to the start of the next season.

Horrified at this ‘unnatural’ and prolonged storage? Don’t be Luddite; as most affluent people view a 52-week supply of crunchy apples as a prerequisite of acceptable life, and as all apples in the northern hemisphere are picked between July and October, the only alternative is shipping fruit from the southern hemisphere (normally Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and South Africa), where it is harvested in March and April. Intelligent use of controlled-atmosphere technology is far more energy efficient. It can even save energy compared to straight refrigeration because the fruit can sometimes be kept at a higher temperature. And don’t be taken in by spurious research sponsored by southern-hemisphere fruit growers; there are almost no circumstances where shipping long distance is environmentally less damaging than storage.