A IS FOR APPLE TREE
Apple trees are seemingly everywhere in Estonia. Every house seems to
have one in its garden, a litter of fruit at the root, a bowlful of
homemade apple sauce at the breakfast table.
You find them in the
most unexpected places, deep in the forest, off track, indicating perhaps where a manor house once
stood, where a family once lived.
There's a bowl of apples sitting waiting for us at Värava Farm when we arrive, hungry after a day of driving and devouring facts. Our guide Maarika, who has tasted these apples before and knows what they're about, encourages us to dig in. They're perfect.
There are several large, mature apple trees at the farm, in the common area in front of our accommodation. The fruit is coming in to season, and hangs like temptation itself, right in front of our eyes. Few of us can resist.
The apple sauce that we have with our breakfast porridge at the farm is some of the tastiest any of us have ever eaten. It's thick, unguent, not too sweet. Are there spices in there? How do you make something this good from a humble apple? We become slightly addicted and porridge and apple sauce quickly forms
part of our ritual for the duration of our stay on Värava Farm.
One of us gets the recipe. It involves a lot of butter and a lot of the kind of sugar you use in making jam. It all starts to make sense. This isn't apple sauce. It's basically apple jam. Like every delicious food, preparation is important, but the quality of the flavour ultimately comes from the quality of the original ingredient. It's hard to imagine creating the same sensation with a bag of Granny Smiths.
When I was growing up, my granny had one out the back of her house in the east end of Glasgow. It produced hard, sour fruit. Deeply untempting. Not the kind you could pick up off the ground and eat straight away, but good for pies. Now, sadly, I can't think of a single apple tree in any garden of any person I know.
The best time to plant an apple tree is twenty years ago, goes the proverb. But it's still not too late to turn Scotland into a nation of apple growers....