We all have scents, sounds and smells which bring back childhood memories.
Famously for Marcel Proust, it was the smell of baking madeleines which immediately transported him back to his aunt’s kitchen, in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’:
‘And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray… my aunt Léonie used to give me…’
For Sabrina it is the sound and smell of wok frying with its smoke and garlic which was inescapable in the Hong Kong streets and apartment blocks of her early childhood and the scent of her mother’s Joy de Patou perfume with its distinctive jasmine top note. For me, it’s the fragrance of my mother’s L’Air du Temps, the rustle of her silk cocktail dress when she came to kiss me goodnight, and the smell of apples from our orchard slowly ripening in the loft above the stable block, which immediately takes me back to my childhood home in the English countryside.
My mother Jill may have been brought up in sub-tropical Buenos Aires, but she certainly used to make glorious apple pies from this north country bounty.
As she died when I was still young and sadly never wrote down the recipe, how she prepared those apple pies is lost in the mists of time, but here is how Sabrina bakes them at home.
Apple Pie with Cinnamon and Apple Sauce: Serves Eight
We’ve enjoyed some awesome pies in Southern California’s diners over the years and the Cinnamon and Apple sauce in this recipe is inspired by one we encountered in Santa Monica.
Pie Crust:
2 sticks (8ozs) frozen salted butter
3 cups AP/plain flour
About ½ cup of water
Dice the butter and put it with the flour in a food processor. Pulse a few times until the butter is about the size of peas. Pour the water through the feed tube and pulse until the dough begins to come together. Stop the machine and test the dough by taking a tablespoon of it and squeezing it together. If it holds its shape it is ready, otherwise add a bit more water to it and pulse again as needed.
Dump the dough out onto a flat surface sprinkled with flour and mould into a ball. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate overnight.
Cut the dough into two pieces, re-wrapping one half and rolling the other into a circle that will fit a 10” pie pan. Repeat with the other half for the top crust.
3lbs apples (I like to use a mixture of varieties) but granny smiths are fine. Peel and core then cut each apple into 12 pieces
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/3 cup sugar
2 tbsp corn starch
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg beaten, for the egg wash
Mix all the ingredients together except the egg. Roll out the dough and fit it in your pie pan. Fill the pie with the apple mixture, top with the second crust, tuck and crimp around the edges to secure. Brush the top crust with the egg mixture and cut 3-4 narrow slits in the pastry for the steam to escape. Place on a sheet pan in the oven, pre-heated to 400 degrees F/ 200 celsius and bake for 1-1/4 hours, or until the crust is brown and the juices are bubbling.
Sauce: Makes about 2 cups
1 gallon of apple cider/juice
Sugar to taste
2 whole cinnamon sticks
Pour the cider/juice into a saucepan with the cinnamon and bring to the boil then reduce the heat to low. Simmer until syrupy; add sugar to taste. Bring back to the boil, stirring all the time, until the sugar has dissolved. Reduce the heat and continue to boil until it is thick and syrupy.
I like to add a dollop of butter to give it an even richer flavor, but that’s up to you.
Here in Los Angeles we don’t have a stable block, let alone any apple trees in our back yard. We are lucky instead to have apricots, plums, kumquats, lemons, loquats and mission figs as our fruit tree companions, but we do make an annual pilgrimage with our daughter to the apple orchards of Oak Glen in the San Bernardino Mountains for the harvest, and it is a day out which is keenly anticipated every year by all three of us.
If not quite the remote, bucolic pursuit that you might hope (the orchards are after all only 90 minutes from LA and that alone means hordes of visitors for the petting zoo, pumpkin patch, cider tastings and apple picking), it’s still a special day in the autumn sunshine which has just the beginnings of a chill in the air.
This year we are on the hunt for rare apple varieties. Growing up, my family’s orchard trees were laden with Cox’s Orange Pippins, but here there are heirloom varieties such as Rome Beauty, Stayman Winesap, a unique pie apple known as Glen Seedling and our favorite, the dramatically dark-skinned Arkansas Black, which we can’t even find in Santa Monica’s wondrous Farmers Markets.
Stopping first at the pumpkin patch, where every year our daughter selects her Halloween Pumpkin for carving, we deposit her selection in the trunk of the car and visit our favorite orchards, starting with the oldest- ‘Parrish Pioneer Ranch’ which dates from the 1860s, when Enoch Parrish planted the first apple trees in the Glen. We then stop by ‘Wood Acres’, where the apple shed is a tiny cinderblock room below Pat Wood’s antique shop, with just enough space for some crates of apples and an antique apple-polishing machine. Here they have the delicious rule that you can’t buy any apples without first tasting all the varieties that are ripe on the day you visit. They specialize in rarities, such as Cinnamon Spice (which actually does have cinnamon flavor at room temperature) and Calville Blanc d’Hiver (a classic French dessert apple). And they have even developed their own variety, Paul’s Big Green.
Then it’s time for us to pick our own at ‘Los Rios Rancho’.
The last stop is always for a late lunch at Law’s Café. Their apple pie is legendary, but best of all they sell the finest cider in the area, which is cold pressed in the family’s cider mill just up the road.
Fully loaded in every sense, we waddle contentedly back to the car for the journey home, with enough produce and flagons of cider to see us through Fall and beyond.
Do you have scents, sounds or smells which immediately evoke your own childhood? We’d love to hear about them.
It’s amazing how scents evoke such vivid memories. This was a really poignant read- I do love nostalgia and tend to keep one foot firmly planted in the past. My Mother only baked one particular cake recipe as she didn’t like baking… she was more of a savoury cook. But it was so delicious! It’s a semolina cake that’s made with orange zest and had caramelised almonds on the top (which I’d get in trouble for picking off the top and eating!), and it’s drizzled in syrup like a middle-eastern cake tends to be and always reminds me of my childhood home. The Cypriots call it “Kallo prama” which translates as “good thing” :-)) Forgive them for not being as good with words as you are, Marco!
I’ve always loved going up to the Oak Glen area. 🍎