Food cultures other than ours have a much richer heritage of making the most of summer’s bounty of fruit. There is almost nothing I envy about the US of recent years, however, it’s hard to ignore its culture of fruit pie.
Stood at the threshold of Summer’s abundance, I think, as I always do, of picking fruit. I am a sucker for pick-your-own fruit farms. My local dealer growing up was Maynard’s on the Kent/Sussex border, and lately, I’ve been known to get my fix from Garson’s in Surrey. I’ve not been, but I have it on relatively good authority that Parkside near Enfield is equally as good. And Chegworth Valley out near Maidstone is certified legendary when it comes to cherries especially.
In fact, due to the weather this year, the fruit is in abundance right now and there couldn’t be a better time to head out and pick a bounty of cherries and the rest. I happen to know that Maynard’s has cherries, strawberries, tayberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries and loganberries all ripe and ready for the plucking. There may even be the tail end of some rhubarb. Cobnuts, apricots, sour cherries and more are on the horizon.
Yesterday I went to my local fruit seller and the nice man sorted me out with some English cherries, raspberries and strawberries, at considerable cost, before gifting me an apple he decreed to be the best he’d ever eaten. I was thrown slightly by the seasonal timing of this gift, but he’s a proud chap, so I assumed it an early crop. Unbagging at home I excitedly inspected this heralded little apple. My instinct hadn’t failed me, the label proudly declared its provenance, New Zealand. FML. It wasn’t even a good apple. (I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth; of course, I ate the thing.) It was this little encounter that put my mind on fruit farms, particularly the pick your own variety.
With the best will in the world, none of us can produce a sustainable crop of fruit from our own courtyards/windowsills/gardens/allotments/etc. So if we want good, picked at peak ripeness, British, pesticide-free (I mean, check your PYO, yeah, but it will certainly be less chemically induced than what’s in the supermarket,) fruit, picked as close as humanly possible to being eaten, surely PYO is the answer?
I recall a few years ago talking to Kitty Travers, purveyor of the best ice cream you’ll ever eat, La Grotta Ices, and she revealed that she too uses Maynard’s in Kent, particularly for their sour cherries.
As kids, we would pick and pick for hours, filling blue tub after blue tub; one for me, one for the tub; cheeky for sure, but you know the drill. By the time we got home we’d be so sick of eating the fruit we’d picked that it would often sit on the sideboard for days before anyone felt capable of going back in for more. This meant we’d often end up cooking with what we’d picked, as opposed to eating it fresh as we’d intended.
Sometimes we made ice cream, sometimes we cooked a pie or a cobbler or a clafoutis or a crumble. Sometimes we made a fool or a charlotte or a summer pudding.
Ice cream was always hard. As any seasoned ice cream producer will attest, sometimes arriving at the most representative flavour for the fruit you’re using is not as straightforward as simply banging loads of that fruit into an ice cream base. I recall raspberry being an elusive essence to capture. The high, floral sweetness underpinned by grassy sourness is almost impossible to maintain all the way through the finished ice cream. It is what makes La Grotta so good, she arrives at the flavour of the thing more often than not by coming at it from multiple angles. Her Raspberry and Rhubarb ripple gets to the flavour you want by bringing together two big characters. Blackberry and Rose Geranium play a similar trick, as do Pear and Myrtle. This alchemy is beyond my limited skill set, so I buy her ice cream and focus instead on what I can do with a bounty of fruit.
I recall rhubarb and gooseberry crumbles being produced quite often, which seems counter, perhaps, to the season, but I maintain that on a cooling, early summer evening alongside a little vanilla ice cream, a crumble is still the perfect thing.
If it was hotter we might have a fool, the poached fruit folded through whipped cream and custard, or more likely a summer pudding. Which is one of three summer ‘pies’ I have continued to make to this day. I have included the recipe I tend to stick to below.
The grass is always greener, right, and as mentioned above I’ve always been drawn to mimicking American fruit pie culture, whining as I do that we don’t have a culture of fruit pies in the UK. In this vein, I’ve included a recipe for a cherry pie reminiscent of strip-mall diner pies consumed on road trips up the Pacific Highway ten years or so ago. In the US these pies would most likely be made with frozen sour cherries, not something I’ve found easy to find here. Instead, I’ve adjusted my recipe to work for fresh English cherries. When you see cherries for sale, buy double what you think you can eat and try making the pie below with your excess.
Finally, I’ve included a recipe for hand pies. These are my answer to the galette, an open pie (or freeform tart) that I have struggled with over the years. These hand pies use the sweet flaky pastry of a galette, but channel the pleasure of a folded pie such as a pasty or a patty or an empanada.
I whinny about the lack of fruit pie culture in the UK, and yet perhaps we’re more proficient than I give us credit for. Contemplating the fruit tarts, crumbles, cobblers, charlottes and puddings of my childhood would certainly suggest a cultural deftness with gluts of summer fruit. Perhaps our breadth of applications defies reductive and homogenous classification? Perhaps we don’t tubthump our triumphs as much as others? Or perhaps no one else overthinks these things as much as I do?
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