Apple Cider Day 2020

Our tree denuded of 180 apples.

This year we picked about 180 apples on Saturday, September 5 and turned them into juice for cider. I also took some photographs. Sadly I thought about photographs only after I had finished climbing about in the tree yelling "I'm a monkey."

After collecting our first 130 apples, we popped them into the bathtub for washing and then took them to the kitchen for chopping and mincing. This year this laborious stage was easier because we now have two wooden cutting boards and I got a friend's never-used big food processor out of the shed to add to our little one. Shortly after noon we had filled every large bowl and pot within reach.  

And then, because it was a nice day, Benedict Ambrose carried the fruit press into the garden and bolted it to a wooden pallet. We then began to press the minced apples, attracting the interested gazes of our neighbours, who eventually came outside to see what we were doing.

Chopped and minced.

I was hoping very much for 10 litres of juice from the 130 apples, but as time went on and the fermenting bin filled but slowly, I collected another 50 or so apples and took them indoors for chopping and mincing. In the end, we got just under 11 litres of juice. 

Then there was a large fuss as I tore the flat apart looking for the Campden tablets. Campden tablets kill any nasty bacteria that has got into the juice plus, unfortunately, the natural yeast on the apples. Technically the Campden tablets are optional, but I am always unconvinced that we have been careful enough about touching the juice only with sterilised stuff. Finally B.A. found the Campden tablets on the microwave oven, beside the eggs (see above).

Nectar of the apple gods.

This year I wore plastic gloves, rinsed the spoons with which I crushed the corrosive Campden tables and washed my hands. 

Meanwhile B.A. and I had opened our two last bottles of 2019 cider. One was drinkable, and one wasn't. We think they were from two different batches that got mixed up since both batches went in identical bottles and later got move around. 

Naturally, we hope all the cider from 2020 will be drinkable. I always worry about it because we never obey the "put your cider in a warm cupboard" instruction because we don't have a warm cupboard in September. Ironically we could have a warm cupboard in November when we turn on the bathroom radiator. However, there it is. I put the fermenting bin on the lowest shelf of the bathroom cupboard to "warm up" for 24 hours. 

In reality it "warmed up" for 48 hours, for we went away on Sunday morning and didn't return until Monday evening. I then sterilised an alcohol measurer, two small spoons and a big spoon, took a juice sample, put in 20 drops of pectinase to break down the little bits of minced apple, scattered over cider yeast, crushed 4 vitamin tablets and chucked them in, and gave it all a good stir with the big spoon. Then I put the fermenting bin back in the cupboard, and next Wednesday, if all goes well, we will rack the cider, which means to put it in demijohns for the next stage. We have two 5 litre demijohns.

For some reason our cider is a lot more variable than B.A's elderflower champagne. B.A. doesn't sterilise anything* for his elderflower champagne, and yet it always turns out amazing. Our cider seems to change from bottle to bottle, which is most aggravating.

This is our third September in this flat and thus our third attempt at making cider. This year B.A. was tired after his cider endeavours but not too exhausted to see the pressing to the end. The first year B.A. was still recovering from extreme radiotherapy and the second year...he was still recovering from extreme radiotherapy. But here we are three years later, and he is strong enough to chop, mince and squish 180 apples with me in one day. 

That said, he doesn't want to do it again this year, so I will be harvesting the rest of our apples for pie filling and jelly. I haven't made apple jelly before, but it seems like a worthy project. Apple jelly is a good base for other jellies, too, so we will pick a lot of brambles, too.

*B.A. says he now sterilises the bottles and the fermentation bin for the elderflower champagne, and before he used "hot soapy water". Huh.

Advent 2: Black Currant Vodka

The Advent Candelabra is my Christmas present from B.A.! 

Some years ago, when Polish Pretend Son expressed unhappiness at being unable to smoke indoors at certain dinner parties, I rashly promised to buy a flat he could smoke in. It was, of course, a joke. However, now that Benedict Ambrose and I have our own home there is no ordinance forbidding PPS from smoking indoors, and it does seem inhospitable to forbid it, especially after years of promising PPS he could smoke indoors when we left the Historical House.

B.A. flip-flopped on the issue. First he said "No". Then, during the merriment of a Schola dinner party on Friday night, he said "Yes."  Then on Sunday he said, "Pipes only."  And, thus, PPS went out for his customary cigarette between meat and pudding, and then when pudding (piernik [gingerbread cake] & mazurek królewski  [ornate jam tart] ) was sufficiently demolished, no fewer than three guests lit their pipes.

Welcome to Traddieland.

The fact that we are no longer at the Historical House is most dramatically illustrated by fire. For nine years, we could not light a match indoors, lest Scotland's Treasure burn to the ground. Not only could no-one smoke indoors (and indeed had to go down three flights of old stone staircase to smoke outdoors), we could not light candles, not even on a birthday cake.

I bought my first box of matches in over a decade at Tesco on Saturday, and (excluding the gas hob) fire was introduced to our home yesterday evening when we lit two purple Advent candles on the dining-room table. And then, after the carrot soup, the roast chicken, roast potatoes, gravy and peas--and PPS's cold outdoor cigarette break--I lit two numerical candles on PPS's gingerbread birthday cake. From the expression on his face, I guessed PPS had mixed feelings about his age confronting him in candle form.

"Can you believe PPS is [redacted]?" I wailed later to the Schola Bass. "He used to be 23!"

"I never think that way," said the Schola Bass cheerfully and took his Hobgoblin beer to the sitting-room so I could clear up.

This morning I counted the bottles. We were expecting seven guests, but in the end we had only five. The seven of us still managed to get through three bottles of red wine, one and a half of white, three (four?) 500-ml bottles of homemade apple cider, three bottles of Hobgoblin , some blackcurrant vodka and some blackcurrant vodka liqueur. That's actually rather abstemious for Scotland. Oh, and five of us had gin-and-tonics before supper, naturally.

B.A. and I made the apple cider, of course, and the more he drank it, the more B.A. liked it. He usually thinks it is too dry, but I think it's lovely. It tastes beautifully of apples.

I made the blackcurrant vodka and the liqueur myself. It was easy. In July 2017, I picked a bagful of black currants from their parent bushes, washed and dried them, put them in a big preserving jar, poured over a big bottle of vodka, and left them alone until Saturday night. On Saturday night, I poured out the liquid, pulverised the swollen blackcurrants, and squished the rest of their vodka/juice through cheesecloth. Then I turned half of the result into liqueur by adding simple syrup and putting the sweetened liquid in two nice bottles.

"You're a real housewife," said Polish Pretend Daughter-in-law, and I felt very pleased. This is a development. I grew up in two of the only three decades in human history when being a housewife was considered shameful, so naturally I never wanted to be one. I was also highly annoyed with PPS on some advanced birthday of my own when I mourned not having a "proper job" and he suggested I make vodka cordials instead. But that was before I stayed a a friend's home in Poland and discovered how important cook/build/pick/brew/distill-it-yourself is in Polish culture.

Now that I have a "proper job" instead of freelancing,  I love all the super old-fashioned housewifely things--like making flavoured vodka and apple cider--I do in what's left of my free time after language studies. And annoying as dusting-and-hoovering is, it is less annoying now that I make an annual salary, too.

PPS and PPDIL both live in Poland now; this was just a weekend visit. The newlyweds were feted from the West End to the New Town to our humble neighbourhood, and at about 10 PPDIL fell asleep on the bed in the corner of our dining room. I found this perfectly sensible, for many a time have I crept away from Schola dinner parties, the men wreathed in smoke and shouting about clerical and musical personages from the halcyon days before their Tiber swims, to fall asleep on the coats on the Bass's bed. As far as I know, I was the only guest ever to do this, so I felt that PPDIL, covered in a beautiful Russian shawl under a cloud of pipe smoke, was a real chip off the Pretend Canadian Mother block.

The dishes were done by 1 AM, and unsurprisingly, I slept past 10 AM. Then I had much to do to stop the dining-room, which doubles as my office, from smelling of pipe tobacco, and I didn't quite manage it.

I thus hereby create a new ordinance called the Polish Pretend Son Privilege: no smoking anything unless PPS is here. After all, I never promised anyone else a flat he could smoke in.

Update: Traddies will be interested in my review of Dr. Kwasniewski's latest book, which I compare to piernik, not because he is Polish-American, but because I had gingerbread on the brain.

The Michaelmas Party

Last night we hosted our first dinner party in St. Benedict over the Apple Tree. It was our first dinner party since, in early February, a faulty fire retardant system changed our lives forever. Dinner parties are our favourite social events, but unfortunately B.A.'s illness has curtailed them greatly for the past year and a half.  (We made an effort for Polish Pretend Son's visits home.) The fact that we can have them again is a sign of hope.

This dinner party took an unusual amount of preparation because of all the boxes lying around.  I  stuffed them into cupboards and closets between cooking tasks. Originally I meant the party to celebrate the end of our move, as well as St. Michael, B.A's anniversary, and our anniversary, but we haven't finished moving. Moving out of a working museum when both halves of a couple work full-time and one is a cancer patient turns out to be a very long, drawn out affair. However, I managed to clear a good space in our new dining-room/guest room/office, and go to Michaelmas Mass, AND cook dinner, so all's well that ends well.

A guest who is increasingly visually impaired got lost on the way, and there were several expeditions to find her. The Schola Bass brought her in, and after I had handed her a restorative glass of hot buttered apple cider with rum, we had the flat blessed by our priest. It was really quite a short ritual beginning with Latin prayers and ending with Father sprinkling holy water in all the corners of the room, where demons might lurk. He sprinkled the hall cupboards, too, so if there are any demons in the flat, they are limited to the bedroom closet.

Then I brought out the soup, vastly grateful that B.A. had set the table. This had not been an easy task because he had to find the wineglasses in their boxes and to remember to bring the silverware and the electric candles from the Historical House.  Now that we no longer live in a museum, we can have real candles, but there were no beeswax candles at either Real Foods or Tesco, so I decided it would be more eco-trad to stick to our rechargeables.

Dinner consisted of "Autumn Vegetable" soup (my family's traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas soup); two fat, roasted free-ranged chickens;sage, apple and onion stuffing; gravy; curried carrots; green beans with almonds and red pepper; and szarlotka, Polish deep-dish apple pie, with whipped cream. There were also cheese, apple slices, and oatcakes afterwards, but nobody was interested in the cheese this time. The truffles I got on sale at Waitrose a few weeks ago were more popular.  And of course there were many bottles of wine, beginning with the fancy Cava my parents sent for B.A.'s birthday in August.

I think one day I will put everything on the table à la Russe so that I don't spend that party jumping up and rushing to the kitchen for the next course, etc. The routine was easier when the kitchen was directly across the hall from the dining-room. This time I missed out on most of the conversations although I do have an amusing anecdote for, having noticed a massive volume on my desk in the corner, an Oxford man, well-primed with wine, asked me why I had a book about polish.

"It's Polish," I explained---and he will never hear the end of it.

I think there was also a conversation touching on modernism, for we were entertained by an anecdote about a Catholic countryman telling a Catholic lady that "It's time somebody put a bung in Kung."

But I must say it was very odd, after nine-and-a-half years of dinner parties in the old dining room in the Historical House (built approximately 1683), to be in a high-ceilinged square room with a rectangular window instead of a long, low-ceiled room with a fireplace and an ox-eye window and the "Polish corridor" (a sleeping nook for visitors or suddenly homeless Polish students) behind B.A. at the head of the table. This time Father was at the head of the table and B.A. was at the foot beside me, and the lighting was different, and the room felt crowded and strange.

It will be more like home, I think, when we get in the last of the furniture, empty the last of the boxes, and get the pictures on the walls.

I wish I had an account of all Historical House dinner parties since late September (or early October) 2008, when B.A. threw a dinner party for me, the recently arrived Canadian guest. but we had so many of them, the basic formula is tattooed deep inside my brain. The most similar part this timewas the Great Dishwash. Looking down into the sink, it was easy to imagine myself in my old kitchen  and forget that the dining-room wasn't just across the hall but through the new sitting-room and then across the hall. Of course, I may have been slightly delirious at that point.

Our guests said nice things about our new flat, and the Bass said the sitting-room reminded him of our sitting-room in the Historical House, which pleased me very much. When the others went away the Master of the Men's Schola, the Bass and B.A. settled into armchairs for a good chat. Shortly after B.A. went to bed, I announced that there would be a new tradition. Thus, the MMS and the B moved their chatting-and-drinking operations into the kitchen while I continued the Great Dishwash.

It's funny about second winds--or third winds. I was probably on my third wind by then. At 1 AM I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with Dr. Bonner's soap and a sponge--as happy as a robin in spring. I don't think it was the rum-laced apple cider either. It was joy at dinner parties returning to our lives.

Over the Apple Tree: A New Beginning

Yesterday I went from Edinburgh Airport to the Historical Stable Block to greet my husband, aka Benedict Ambrose (his nom-de-blog of long ago), and get the keys to our new home. I didn't know I was going to rush there at once; I thought I would go to the Historical House and attempt to sleep off jet lag before embarking on our mini-move.

But once the keys were in my hand, I shouldered my trusty Osprey travelling bag and headed down the stairs, down the street and around the corner to Saint Benedict over the Apple Tree.

That's what we've named our new apartment, in case you were confused.

Saint Benedict over the Apple Tree is an "upper villa", a fancy phrase meaning a flat that has its own front door on the top floor of a two-storey structure. Our building, dating from 1930, contains four "lower villas" and four "upper villas". The lower villas have front doors facing the street, and the upper villas have front doors facing the back gardens and staircases leading down into them. The lower villas have small front gardens, too. We have never had a garden of our own, so a back garden is enough to be getting on with--especially as ours has a wonderful apple tree at the end.

The first thing I did when I got to SBotAT was find a rain-washed windfall apple that wasn't bug-munched or bruised and eat it. It was a little underripe, but it would have made a great cooking apple and boded well for the future.  Munching, I went up the concrete staircase and unlocked the door.

The first thing I saw was that B.A. had pinned up a crucifix and the ceramic holy water stoup we bought in Barcelona. He had stuck palm crosses artistically behind the stoup, too. I noticed also that the narrow hallway has several vanished pine doors and door frames, most dramatically at the end, where the double-cupboard sits.

Although I have reviewed photos of the property several times since we first saw it, I had forgotten all about the hallway, which the realtor hadn't considered photo-worthy. I wondered if all that pine wasn't a bit naff, for there is nothing like it featured on one of my current favourite blogs, Mad about the House.  But fortunately for the family finances, another of my current favourite blogs is Mr Money Moustache, not because I want to retire at 50 but because, when I do retire, I don't want to depend solely on a state pension.

Ourselves at the Historical Stable Block in more glam days

After sitting in the empty living-room and contemplating a large square of green shag carpet (also missing from Mad about the House), I made a cup of coffee and enjoyed the feeling of being a homeowner. Then I went back to the Historical House for a truly alarming session of carting furniture essentials (including a King-sized mattress) down the stairs with a hired man-with-van and my tumour-survivor husband.

But to make an unpleasant story short, here we are with a very minimalist interior---although, not boding well for minimalism, B.A. considered the aspidistra stand and an ornamental cane-backed chair essentials. Today he brought home his favourite X-frame coffee table--on which no-one is allowed to put coffee.  Well, I did say that we can bring only those things that we really love, and B.A. really loves the cane-backed chair (in which no-one can sit), the coffee table (on which no-one can put a coffee), and the aspidistra stand (on which stands no aspidistra).

Besides those beloved objects, we have a blue formica topped table (my love), two matching spindle-backed armchairs (B.A.'s loves), two squashy square green velvet Parker Knoll armchairs (our mutual loves) and our year-old King-sized oak bed (ditto).

Beloved table, doomed green shag rug

Apart from clothes, two more crucifixes, two pots, a pan, some utensils, a few glasses and two pasta bowls, that's about it. We love the feeling of space so much that the old IKEA sofa back in the Historical Attic is doomed. However, we have opted to make the smaller bedroom our own bedroom and the "master bedroom" into a guest bedroom/dining room/office/library, so any furniture we like so much we are willing to wrestle it down three flights of sandstone and up one flight of concrete, will go in there.

The blog is called "Apples and Roses" because we not only have an apple street, we have a row of wild rose bushes, white, pink and red, all along one of the fences. It's also a nod to my patron saint, whose bones--despite the post-conciliar doubts--repose under an altar in Trastevere.

Because I write about the political--especially the Church political--all day, this blog will be as apolitical and as domestic as possible while striving to remain deeply rooted in reality. I will probably occasionally lapse into deep thoughts about the Single Life, and I will definitely opine on the Care and Feeding of Husbands, now that I feel I have been married long enough to say something about that. But I hope to write mostly about minimalism, thrift, zero-wasting, gardening, literature and language learning. Oh, and I will add more photos because I really must learn to take good photographs now that I am a full-time reporter.