Food History

Tonight it will be six degrees. This is rather cold for February in Australia. I felt the weather change a few days ago and knew that autumn had come early. I even blogged about it. What I forgot to do was think about what this meant for local growing seasons.

Today I rang my favourite heritage apple grower and asked him. The summer apples were on time, but the autumn apples are early. It’s as simple as that.

Jonathon has two tonnes of bullaces to sell and just a few greengages and mirabelles. I’m sorely tempted by the bullaces, since they’re such an ancient stone fruit and I haven’t ever been able to get enough to make liqueur out of. If I can sort out delivery, this may be my year.

These are already the last of his stone fruit. I’m fascinated by the sheer amount of bullaces and that no-one is buying the mirabelles. I’m not surprised he has greengages over. They’re not a fruit that has ever tempted me unduly. It’s just because I’ve only met the wrong greengages, perhaps. I might have to try them again. Not this year, though. This year will be the Year of the Bullaces (if I can sort out the logistics).

The apples that are ready (or ready enough) right now are coxes, pommes de neige, Egremont russets (a 19th century apple), English russets, reine de reinette, calville blanc d’hiver. These are not the fruits of summer.

Soon his Five Crowns will be ready and some old pear varieties. In a couple of weeks the stone fruit will be gone from the markets, too. Winter will be here.

The seasons are so crucial to understanding food history. Every time I notice a change I’m reminded of this. I guess that’s why I do so many posts on seasonal changes.

Food was never as divorced from the seasons as it is in big developed cities today. Most of our ancestors watched the seasons closely, because what they would eat and how well they would eat was so closely linked to them. An autumn like this was the time to make sure there was food for winter, just in case the earliness of it meant a long, long winter.

If you want to know more about the varieties of plums and apples, then check out the Brogdale site. If you want to understand how the seasons and climate affect food, look outside and look at old cookbooks and novels, read account books and letters. I’ll keep talking about it here, of course, but there’s so much to understand and so many links you can make that one person’s blog just isn’t enough. I want to buy those apples and cook some bullaces. I want to understand where they fit in that gap between summer and autumn and how their presence affects people’s culinary traditions. Time, I think, to go shopping.