Clearing. Quince Jelly. Towpath.

I pruned some congested branches out of the Hudson’s Golden Gem apple tree. It’s about seven years old and producing well. These apples are truly gold: bright clear yellow with a crosshatch of dull ochre russeting and a speckled static of red bug damage. They are at their best after a couple months in the fridge. They wither and grow leathery. In 2009, when I was an intern with Anthony and Carol, farmers at Ayer’s Creek Farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, they called them Leather Jackets. The flesh concentrates its sugars, the softened texture is not a detractor. They are a glorious packet of preserved summer in December, eaten with a slice of cheese.

I cut one or two branches with a Japanese hand pruning saw. Alone, I could ‘fell’ a ten foot branch about as thick as my wrist. I made a small cut on the underside, then sawed through the topside leaving a shallow collar of branch on the main trunk of the tree. The limb falls outward away from me directed by the lower cut and does not rip wood or bark downward. Suddenly the tree can breathe! There’s space for a swallow to fly through the branches, which is what they say is ideal. 

This is not the pruning season and I hope I’m not causing harm. I had begun with the intention to do some summer pruning which has the advantage of not stimulating a lot more green growth (as winter pruning does). But summer became October rather quicker than I’d planned. Pruning feels harsh but when you hit upon the right branch, the one that’s crowding and chaffing, that’s growing at an odd angle and unbalancing the whole tree, it feels like a wonderful release. The tree can express itself more purely. 

Similarly, leaf drop feels like loss; yet it is necessary for the new to emerge. That moment of letting go, the exhale of the leaf floating downward, irrevocably leaving its habitual place, remains heart-rending. It feels necessary that it’s a process, an entire season: autumn. It’s encouraging to realize the tree has already made next year’s leaf bud. It’s right at the base of the old leaf, waiting for the old to wrap up, clear the stage, and claim its own space to unfurl.

My quince tree offers up its fragrant fuzzy yellow fruit late in the pome fruit season. I hurry them indoors so they can sit and emit their citrusy, somehow medieval scent from a bowl on the table. I’m going to make them into jelly from a recipe in the Towpath cookbook. 

I’ve just returned from England where I had a few beautiful bites at Towpath. Along a canal in east London, the restaurant exists in four shallow kiosks that open and spill tables and chairs and flowers and delicious food out onto the pavement along an east London canal for passers by. I ate olive oil cake, fried eggs with sage and brown butter on toast, little seared peppers snowed with grated egg… and tiny tumblers of velvety Sangiovese from Tuscany. Lori De Mori, co-owner and curator of this exquisite and unusual experience is a friend from my days in Italy with Peggy Markel. Her familiar aesthetic made me feel right at home in the middle of a vast foreign city.

The jelly is a luminous rosy orange and I will eat it with some slightly stinky, firm alpine cheese. And my leather jacket apple. 

Further Threads….

Lori De Mori, Laura Jackson, Towpath

Katherine May, Wintering

Peggy Markel’s Culinary Adventures. peggymarkel.com

Anthony and Carol Boutard, Ayer’s Creek Farm