Rogue harvest

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A day in late October. The air is bright, the sky is blue. This will take some searching, but Thomas isn’t easily discouraged. He keeps a watchful eye for hints and clues. To the left, there’s a stone wall that once traced the outline of a field, to the right the remnants of a path. There it is, an orchard over-run by second stage forest. Old fruit trees stand out, their branches twisted or broken. There’s life in them still, they carry gnarly apples and cooking-pears. Collecting the fruit isn’t easy. Unpruned all these years, the branches are thorny and tangled in vines. Wild food foraging at its best.

Jolie-laide

I come home to a Rembrandesque vision of plates and bowls overflowing with Lescure heirloom fruit. Gloriously ill-shapen, odd and ugly. The pears are poached in red wine and cinnamon, the apples will make their way into oldfashioned apple-pie. There’s room for experiment too: tarty chutneys and sloe berry liquor. The latter recipe calls for gin, but there’s none in the larder, so Thomas decides on a forgotten bottle of Nicaraguan sugarcane rum. Different, to say the least.

1 Comment

  1. Such heirloom fruit carries with it the wisdom of the cosmos – the undisturbed Schumann resonance of planet earth to structure the water and to form them. Eating coherent information rather than mere sugars and carbs and such, though the latter are delightful qualities as well. Surely one’s biology will welcome their clarity with immense joy.

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