A slice of Cape apple history - and recipe

Spiced up: Pork cutlets with apples, fennel bulb and cashews. Picture: Tony Jackman

Spiced up: Pork cutlets with apples, fennel bulb and cashews. Picture: Tony Jackman

Published Sep 4, 2013

Share

Cape Town - I was given a charming little book about apples by the redoubtable Brian Berkman, he of the formerly impressive girth who now is hard to spot in a can of sardines. Fortunately there is still enough of him left to market certain covetable foodlike things, and numbered among these are the apples put out by Tru-Cape, whose Buks Nel and Henk Griessel have come up with an informative little tome full of quirky facts.

Surprisingly, it turns out to be an important book, much more so than you might expect of one whose purpose essentially is to market a company’s products. But in fact, there’s a mission involved: Griessel and Nel, who respectively are Tru-Cape’s quality assurance manager and new cultivar developer, are distressed about the disappearance of most of the old apple varieties at the Cape, and that little has been recorded about them.

But they’re doing something about it. They urge us all to plant modern varieties in our gardens, parks and botanical gardens, so that no more disappear, and are on a quest to re-establish “heritage” apple varieties on farms and in home gardens over the next few years.

The apple’s incredible story as told by Nel and Griessel begins in the Celestial Mountains between Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan and Xinjiang Uyghur in China, travelling from Altamy (the “city of apples”) via Egypt in the time of Rameses, with some considerable help from Alexander the Great who took apples to Macedonia and elsewhere in Europe, whence of course the Romans took over and sent them far and wide, being the colonising busybodies they were.

Skip several centuries and we find the Dutch bringing them to the Cape to be planted by, no prizes for guessing, onz eie Jannie van Riebeeck, in the shadows of Table Mountain or, as they call it, Hoerikwaggo, the mountain of the sea in Khoisan.

The first to be picked, on April 17, 1662 (seedlings having later been brought from St Helena) were wijnappels, of which there were red and white varieties. Griessel and Nel report that in recent years the white wijnappel has been traced to a garden in Aalburg, Netherlands, and they are determined to grow it again at the Cape.

They discuss ancient varieties such as the kroonappel, Peppin d’Or and Reinette doré, but give most of their attention to 10 of what they term “heritage” varieties, their criteria being that they had to have been recorded pre-1900 but also planted commercially later, indicating influence on the Cape’s apple industry. Not all of them will be very familiar. They include Cox’s orange pippin, the English variety that was among the first recorded at the Cape, so you can cook with Cox’s in a spirit of using something well-rooted in our climes.

Less well known is the Cleopatra, the “big yellow apple” an older generation of growers remembers. Though considered Australian, Nel and Griessel say its origins are in the US, although they find no mention of it after the 1940s. Odd, though, that among the “heritage” apples they include the Jonathan, which though prominent in the US “made but a tiny blip on the historical apple radar of South Africa and then disappeared”.

Another American apple is the Northern Spy, regarded there as “the premium apple for apple pie”. The Ohenimuri (“Hennie” to local pickers) is now extremely rare, while the Red Astrachan, though not a commercial success at the Cape, is included because “it could have been responsible for giving us some of our own local colonial or Cape seedlings”. We are never likely to see or taste one, as even the older generation of growers do not remember it.

To learn more about the Rome Beauty, the Wemmershoek, the Winesap, and the White Winter Pearmain, you’ll have to source the book, Apples in the Early Days at the Cape, which you can obtain by emailing [email protected] and it will set you back R250, which strikes me as rather steep.

In the meantime, use one or other of your favourite modern varieties to make this savoury pork dish. It’s a recipe inspired by one I spotted on the excellent www.taste.com.au website which is packed with great recipes…

 

Pork cutlets with apples and cashews

1/2 cup flour, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little ground ginger

1 pork cutlet each

1 fennel bulb each

2 mace husks

2 star anise

6 cloves

1 tsp ground ginger

250ml cranberry juice

Salt and ground white pepper to taste

3 apple slices each, about 0.5cm thick

50g raw cashews

Put the flour and seasoning in a bag and shake. Add the (cleaned and patted dry) cutlets, close the top of the bag and shake well to coat.

Fry the cutlets in batches for two or three minutes on each side, and place in a heavy casserole.

Cut the choke out of the bottom of each fennel bulb, quarter and place in the casserole, discarding the chokes.

Add the mace, star anise, cloves, ground ginger, cranberry juice, seasoning, and place the apple slices on top. No need to core, the “star” at the centre of the slices acts as a sort of built-in garnish. Bring to a simmer on the stove top, then bake in a 200ºC oven for about half an hour, until the apples turn softly golden.

Toast the cashews in a dry frying pan, tossing, until they turn lightly golden, and scatter over to serve. Reduce the remaining juices down a little to thicken the sauce if you like. - Weekend Argus

Related Topics: