Norfolk Apples in October: Beefings, Bramleys and Late Keepers

The orchard smell in October is half fruit and half rot: windfalls split in the grass, wasps working the bruised side, and above them the last apples on the tree still hard and green on the shaded side. By the middle of the month the early varieties are long gone. What hangs on now are the keepers, the apples that were never meant to be eaten off the branch, and in Norfolk that has a particular local history behind it.

What is ripe in the middle of October

Apple ripening in the east of England runs in a long relay from August to the end of October. Discovery and the other summer apples come first, crisp and sweet and useless for storing; they soften within days of picking. Cox’s Orange Pippin, Egremont Russet and the other mid-season dessert apples follow from late September. By mid-October the cooking apples and the long keepers are colouring up, and the trees that carry them are usually the ones left until last.

The test for readiness is simple and works on any variety. Cup the fruit, lift it a little above the horizontal and twist gently. If it comes away with its stalk, it is ready; if it clings, leave it another few days. Brown pips are a second clue. A tree with a steady drop of sound windfalls is usually telling the same story, although a sudden heavy drop after a gale says more about the wind than the fruit.

There is no single picking date for a tree. Fruit on the sunny south side ripens first, the apples deep in the canopy lag behind, and a careful picker goes over the same tree two or three times. That patience matters most with keepers, because an apple picked too early shrivels in store and one picked too late goes mealy before Christmas.

The Norfolk Beefing and the biffin trade

Norfolk has its own old apple, and it is not a pretty one. The Norfolk Beefing is a flattish, dark red cooking and drying apple with a tough skin and firm flesh, recorded in the county from the late seventeenth century. Estate records connected with the Walpole family at Mannington mention it, and it stayed a familiar Norfolk variety through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The name is usually explained by the colour of the skin, a deep beef red, though the spelling wandered for centuries: Beefing, Biffin, even a Frenchified Beaufin that later writers dismissed as a mistake.

What made the Beefing famous was not eating it raw. Norwich bakers would finish the day’s bread, then put trays of whole Beefings into the cooling ovens with a weight on top. Over several days, as the oven was reheated and cooled, the apples were pressed a little flatter each time, the air driven out and the skins left whole. The result was a biffin: a dark, sticky, leathery disc that kept for months and tasted something like a cross between a baked apple and a fig. Biffins went to London by the barrel for the Christmas market, and Charles Dickens lists Norfolk Biffins among the treats in the grocers’ windows in A Christmas Carol.

The trade faded long ago, and the Beefing has largely disappeared from the county’s orchards, replaced by Bramleys and Coxes that suit modern supermarkets better. A few old trees survive in gardens and heritage collections, and some orchard groups graft new ones. If a Beefing does turn up at a market stall or an apple event, it is worth buying for the curiosity alone, and it is entirely possible to make a version of a biffin in a domestic oven on its lowest setting, pressing the apples between two trays each time the oven is used for something else.

A side note on names, which has nothing to do with Norfolk. Pippin, as in Cox’s Orange Pippin, originally meant an apple tree raised from a pip rather than grafted, which is why it turns up in so many old variety names. Almost every pippin is now propagated by grafting, like every other named apple, because seed never comes true.

A table of apples worth knowing in October

The varieties below are among the easiest to find in the east of England in autumn. The keeping times are rough and depend on how cool and even the store is; a warm kitchen shortens every one of them.

Bramley, the cooking apple everyone uses

The Bramley’s Seedling came from a pip planted in a garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, early in the nineteenth century, and it is now the cooking apple most British cooks mean when they say “cooking apple”. Its virtue is acidity. A Bramley collapses into a fluffy, sharp purée in a few minutes over a low heat, which is exactly what is wanted for apple sauce, crumble and the base of a chutney, and it needs far less sugar than a recipe written for sweeter fruit might suggest.

For plant-based cooking the Bramley does most of the work without help. A purée made with a splash of water, a strip of lemon peel and a little brown sugar freezes well in small tubs and goes into porridge, cakes and winter pancakes. Baked whole, cored and stuffed with chopped dates, oats and a spoonful of vegetable spread, it becomes a pudding in forty minutes at 180°C. A few leaves of lemon thyme pushed into the stuffing work surprisingly well, and there is more about that particular plant on our lemon thyme page.

Dessert apples behave differently in the pan. A Cox holds its shape when sliced and fried, which makes it the better choice for a tart where the slices should stay distinct, and russets roast well in wedges alongside parsnips and red onions.

How to store a crop through the winter

Storing apples is mostly about choosing the right ones. Only fruit picked by hand, with the stalk intact and no bruise, split or peck mark, should go into store; a single damaged apple rots and spreads that rot to its neighbours. Windfalls, however sound they look, are for using straight away.

The ideal place is cool, dark, slightly humid and well ventilated, with a steady temperature a few degrees above freezing. A garage, a cellar or a frost-free shed on the north side of a house all work. Lofts usually do not, because they swing between warm and freezing.

Each apple can be wrapped loosely in a sheet of newspaper or greaseproof paper and laid in a single layer in a slatted tray or a shallow box, not touching its neighbours. Wrapping slows moisture loss and stops rot jumping from fruit to fruit. Different varieties should be kept apart and labelled, because they ripen in store at different speeds, and the earliest keepers need eating first. Apples also give off ethylene as they ripen, so they are best kept away from potatoes and other stored vegetables. A look through the trays every week or two, removing anything softening, is the whole of the maintenance, and it pays off: a well-kept Bramley in February is just as good in a crumble as one picked in October.

The RHS guide to growing apples covers picking and storing in more detail, along with pruning and the pests that leave marks on the skin.

Apple Day and the orchards around Norwich

Apple Day falls on 21 October. It was started by the charity Common Ground in 1990 to celebrate local varieties and the orchards that grow them, and it has since spread into a loose season of autumn apple events across the country, often held on the nearest weekend. Community orchards, heritage gardens and village halls in Norfolk tend to join in with pressing, tasting tables and identification, where someone with a long memory and a reference book will try to name the fruit from an old garden tree.

These events are the best place to taste varieties that never reach a shop. Most of the apple varieties ever grown in England are now rare, and an identification table is where a forgotten local apple sometimes gets its name back. Taking three or four fruit from a mystery tree, with a few leaves and a note of when it ripens, gives the identifiers something to work with.

Norwich itself was once ringed with market gardens and orchards, and old fruit trees still stand in back gardens across the city, many of them older than the houses next to them. Plenty go unpicked every year. A neighbourly knock on a door in October often ends with a bag of apples and a grateful owner who never knew what to do with the crop.

Using the windfalls first

Windfalls are the cook’s apples, not the store’s. They bruise when they land, so the job is to sort them quickly: cut out the damaged side, discard anything with a grub inside and use the rest within a day or two. A big pan of windfall purée, sharpened with a Bramley or two, can be frozen flat in bags for the rest of the winter.

Chutney is the other answer to a glut. Apples, onions, raisins, cider vinegar and brown sugar cooked down slowly for a couple of hours make a dark, thick chutney that is ready to eat by Christmas and improves for months afterwards. Mustard seed suits it, which is fitting in a city long associated with mustard milling.

Apple rings dried in a very low oven, or on the rack above a radiator, keep in a jar for weeks and make a reasonable everyday cousin of the biffin. Slice the apples thinly across the core, dip the rings briefly in water with a little lemon juice to slow browning, and dry them until leathery rather than crisp.

For everything else in season around now, from pears to the first parsnips, the what’s in season calendar runs month by month, and the rest of the journal follows the year round from here. If you have an old tree in the garden that nobody can name, October is the month to pick a few good specimens, wrap them in paper and take them to the nearest apple identification table before they soften.