As a devotee of heritage apple varieties - and no one is more delighted than I am when the fragrant boxes start to appear at farmers' markets and outside Neal's Yard Dairy - I am supposed to despise Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Pink Lady and other such plastic-bag-packed, supermarket waxed, varieties.
But outside of September and November, when I spend most of my time crunching on Norfolk Russets or Nutmeg Pippins, I do occasionally have a yen for a soft, sweet-scented Golden Delicious, spraying sugary juice as you bite into it, or a crisp, plastic-skinned Granny Smith, whose acid flesh was always paired in my adolescent midnight snacks with processed red cheddar. Pink Ladies are a more recent introduction and so have no childhood memories to soften my perception that they are a scary apple clone, intended to satisfy the minimum requirements of an apple and therefore quell our desire for the wild and inefficient variety of oddly sized, differingly flavoured, sometimes scabby or misshapen apples that are the natural heritage of anyone brought up in the temperate climes of north-west Europe.
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