Granny Smith is the world's oldest favorite...

It is often said that many fruits and vegetables do not taste as good as they used to. You only have to walk through a supermarket to realise what a limited range of commercial fruit varieties we have available to us. I was thumbing through old garden catalogues and amazed to find pages filled with plums, peaches, pears and apples of every variety, few of which are grown today. It is sad to think of what has been lost, but fortunately there is one variety of apple known as Granny Smith is still available. This green cooking apple is appreciated around the world, especially as a filling for apple pie. It was named after Maria Smith who, in 1880s grew the first green apple in Eastwood, a neighbouring suburb very close to us. Every year a Granny Smith Festival is organised by the Ryde City Council in spring to commemorate this local heritage. It was held last Saturday and thousands of people flood the Eastwood town centre with colour, noise. parade and food stalls to be part of the annual event. We joined in the celebration by buying a dozen of this old favourite cooking apples and make them into three apple crumble pies for dessert. To give a delightful crimson colour to the pies, we added a handful of mulberries which we have collected from our backyard.



Apple Crumble Recipe.

4 medium Granny Smith apples
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup mulberries (optional)
1/2 cup raisins
3/4 cup rolled oats or desiccated coconut.
3/4 cup flour
75g butter

Peel and quarter apples. Remove core and add apples into a saucepan with the water,raisins and 1/4 cup of sugar. Bring to boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Simmer for 15 minutes until apples are slightly softened.Add in the mulberries and cook for a minute. Preheat the oven to 180 degree C. Place the cooked apples and mulberries in a baking dish. Mix together the desiccated or oats, flour, butter and remaining sugar, rubbing the ingredients together until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Sprinkle over the fruit.Bake for 20 t0 30 minute or until the crumple topping is golden brown.

Why there is no silkworm in the wild?

Last night,we baked this mulberry and apple crumble pie for our gathering of friends at home.It soon became a conversation piece at the table because most of the young Singaporeans present,not only had they not tasted it before, they had not seen a fresh mulberry fruit. Since we didn't use up all the mulberries collected from this year's bumper crop on the tree, we felt duty-bound to pass a bowl of mulberry fruits around. Of course, we were not surprised by their admittance that they had not seen a fresh mulberry fruit since they grew in a city state most of their lives. Furthermore, mulberries are more homegrown rather than commercial available in the stores or supermarkets as the fruits are very perishable and does not ripen off at the same time. In the course of conversation, it was brought up that the black fruited mulberry (morus nigra) that we eat is a different to the white fruited mulberry ( morus alba) leaves that silkworms eat as their primary food source. Another point of interest in this 'hanashi no tane" (conversation piece) is that the silkworm has been domesticated since sericulture has been practised for at least 5,000 years in China that it is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and no longer occurs naturally in the wild. I can't help but to ponder over the piece mulberry pie, is it not correct, due to the domestication process by human having accelerated the pace of evolution in an unnatural way, that I have not find a single silkworm chomping away the leaves of my mulberry tree.

Mulberry and Apple pie Recipe.

2 cups plain flour
1/4 cup of caster sugar
125 g cold butter, cubed
2 tbsp of cold water
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp of orange rind

Filling

500 g fresh mulberries
410 g can apples
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 tbsp cornflour



Add sugar, orange rind into the flour. Rub in the cubed butter into flour until the mixture is fine and crumbly and add water until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Place the apples, sugar and corn flour in a small pan and stir over low heat until the mixture is slightly thickened. Set aside to cool and add mulberries and gently stir through. Spoon into a 23 cm pie dish and smooth the surface and sprinkle the flour mixture on top of the pie.Sprinkle the brown sugar. Bake at 210 C for 10 minutes and reduce oven temperature to 180 C and bake for another 30 minutes or until crumble topping is golden. Serve with cream or ice cream.

Why are Mulberries not sold in the fruit shops or markets?

Mulberries are not readily available in fruit shops or markets as they are very difficult to handle and perishable because of their high water content and thin skins. They soon ferment or get moldy. Not only they are difficult to transport because of its perishable nature, they are also difficult to harvest as they ripen over an extended period of time unlike many other fruits which seem to come all at once. This is why you rarely seem them in stores. But you're most likely to find mulberries in the gardens or your neighborhood, parks, in fields, especially along the edges of open bushes and ripening in late spring and early summer. Furthermore, you can spot ripe mulberries in season from a distance because the fruits make such a mess on the ground.


As a prevention for my mulberry bush to make a mess in the backyard, I have been going around the bush and collecting the ripened berries in the last couple of days, in some ways reminiscent of a nursery rhyme I have learn as a child. Once, I have collected enough berries I will make a mulberries pie. Please stay tuned.