When Keats described the glorious abundance of our native land in his ode To Autumn I suspect the apples that weighed heavy on the boughs of the "moss'd cottage trees" were a trusty old English variety – if not the lyrically named Beauty of Bath or Yorkshire Goosesauce, then certainly a Cox's Orange Pippin. Not, it is safe to assume, the overly sweet juice bomb otherwise known as the Gala, which if it earned frequent-flyer miles would surely accrue plenty to bypass the mouth of some greedy pom and get straight back on the first plane home.
But last year the Gala, a New Zealand import beloved of the supermarkets for its saccharine sweetness, its evenness of skin-tone and its homogeneity of flavour, pipped the Pippin to the popularity post. According to latest figures from the English Apples and Pears Association, British supermarkets sold more than 22,000 tonnes of the variety last year, compared with 21,600 tonnes of Coxes.
Now why does this make me cross? Perhaps because an apple is the quintessential English fruit – after all English and apple are two words that go together as naturally as sugar and spice, preferably in a crumble. Apples are our heritage: they've been around for long enough with the oldest English apple, the Pearmain, recorded in a Norfolk document of 1204. And we've been growing them enthusiastically since Henry VIII established the first large-scale orchards at Teynham in Kent. They are woven into our folklore too: would Isaac Newton have discovered the theory of gravity had a Lincolnshire apple not fallen from a tree in his mother's garden in 1666?
Last but not least, our culinary history would be poorer without this staple fruit, arriving in late summer and happy in cold store until well into the following spring. If Mrs Beeton can include at least 30 apple recipes in her Book of Household Management, surely we must offer our humble homegrown fruit a little respect?
The problem is that with supermarkets supplying the majority of our fruit and home-grown produce having to compete with cheaper imported goods, the holy trinity of Gala, Braeburn and Fuji – compliant in shape and size to the requirements of conveyor-belts and moulded polystyrene boxes – are what we have come to expect an apple to be. A lifetime of over-exposure to sugar has numbed our taste-buds sufficiently for only the sweetest of fruits to satisfy. As far as texture is concerned, we seem happy to settle for floury cotton-wool innards so long as the apple's uniform skin is waxily smooth and blemish-free.
According to Defra, figures a couple of years ago showed that only 31% of the eating apples sold in the UK are home-grown – from the news today it may now be lower still. And it is a two-pronged attack against diversity because while the Gala is originally from the southern hemisphere, since the 1990s it has been cultivated in this country to fulfil supermarket demand, further elbowing out our traditional varieties. And there are many to lose.
At the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale Farm in Kent there are an astonishing 2,200 varieties of apples held – many represented by just one or two trees. Yet they all grow easily in this country: trees happy to plant their gnarled roots in our moist soil and brace their boughs against the wind and rain until ripe fruit with just the right balance of acidity falls heavily to the ground below. In gardens and parks up and down the land, windfall apples are one of the best free foods around.
English apples stand for diversity and seasonality at their best. The first rosy-cheeked Worcester Pearmains, 150-years-old with a delicate pink blush to their flesh, arrive in August, just the right size for lunchboxes as children return to school. Soon after the tawnier russets, like Egremont and the excellent Laxton's Superb, are being harvested. I wait months for these sharp, rough-skinned specimens, eating so many that my teeth protest against the sudden acid bath. And the unmistakable-tasting Cox of course, the perfect complement to a slice of Montgomery's cheddar and deserving of its place at the top of our list of favourites – until now.
Maybe it's not all bad news. Many supermarkets have cottoned on to the fact that consumers care about buying local, and bags of apples are flagged up as coming from regional farms, although all too often they are sitting on the shelf next to imports, even at the height of the British season. As customers we need to keep demanding English apples in order to make sure that they will be supplied. Keep your taste buds sharpened on old varieties from farmers markets and farm shops, visit orchards and plant heritage seedlings your own garden and soon the bland and sugary Gala will lose its appeal. Let's hope that when next year's figures come out the mighty Cox will be king once again.
