I think about Tracey Emin eating apples all the time. Well, mostly when I’m eating an apple, which probably isn’t often enough. Emin told the chef Ruthie Rogers that she eats six to eight apples every day, preferably Pink Lady. They are her favourite thing to eat, her comfort food. She’ll wash three apples at a time, put them on a breadboard and slice bits and pieces off, all different sizes, until she gets to the core. Then she’ll place them on a beautiful blue plate and eat all the shapes. Since hearing this1 I always cut up apples before eating them (unless on the hoof). I like the ritual and the pile of crescents. Though I used to eat them core, pips and all, laughing in the face of cyanide.
It’s not only Emin that comes to mind. Another artist vaguely hoves into view re: apples – this one fictional, fabulous, wholly ridiculous and barely remembered. In Jilly Cooper’s Pandora (the one set in the art world, not strictly Rutshire Chronicle canon but connected) there’s a sculptor – I think she’s a sculptor – who, alongside causing scandals and being a ravishing cat among the pigeons, only eats apples all through the day as she works. She’s then of course ravenous in the evening. Jilly Cooper characters are always ravenous and/or roaring and/or ravishing and/or rakes – and more often than not utterly bloody and routinely snapped at for being fatuous. (I want to use that last one more.) Cooper isn’t great on women and food, as a rule. There’s an awful lot of drinking great quantities of champagne on empty stomachs, as well as morality and hierarchical status attached to appetites (food, but also otherwise) and size. Even Janey Lloyd-Foxe, the badly behaved, gin-swilling, very fun Fleet Street hack, seems to be on a diet half the time – thankfully mostly broken due to large lunchtime aperitifs.
While we’re on both apples and alcohol, my youngest brother now makes cider. He puts out calls for apples and hitches lifts all over Scotland and Northumberland to fetch great hauls. I imagine him roving around the countryside in a cramped vehicle with a very generous driving pal, the car jam-packed with slightly fermenting fruit. It can sometimes take a bit of time to get arrangements in place, so the apples may be overripe, a shred past their best. But he’s got the kit, curiosity and taste for it (plus a chemist chap on hand), and that strong flat cider is being bottled. I’m keeping mine for early summer, when it’ll be in its prime.
Last summer we stumbled across bottles of Cidre Breton in a bar. They cried out to be sipped outside and immediately transported me to Brittany. (I have never been to Brittany. I imagine it’s just how it looks on the jolly bottle artwork.) Cidre Breton is so sweet and delicious I could probably drink a crate. This same righteous bar – New River Studios in the Manor House Warehouse District for those on the hunt – also sells Duchesse de Bourgogne, a Flemish red sour ale of over 6% abv and under £4 that has been described as tasting like balsamic vinegar (no, no, in a good way!). I always order one or two when given the chance. It has the feel of an archaic brew, and just look at de Bourgogne’s 90s brows and her tiny pointing finger.
Cider from casks that once held rum is obviously the kind I crave most this time of year. I think I first tasted this revelation at the Southampton Arms a long time ago, one of the few places I might consider a cider over beer. If you time it right on the food front, do have a pint with their hot roast pork buns. Topped with a gobbet of crackling, the bap is deep-filled with pig and, of course, apple sauce. (Hot baps are one of the many reasons this is a top tier pub, and also why we try to go at times when others might not – increasingly futile.)
Emin had this conversation – which also covered the incredible fact that she was once eating a thousand (cheap) oysters a week – on Ruthie’s Table 4, The River Cafe podcast. This pod is a bit of a mixed bag, but worth glancing through for people of interest. (Victoria Beckham is a woman of many talents, but a passion for food/eating she does not have in spades. Or at least this is not conveyed.) It’s also worth tuning in for the restaurant's menu and recipe recitations.