My mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge – far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant – but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She’d never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all. She loved to throw in a rogue element. As I write this, I’m flicking through her magazine cuttings, and she’s made a note above an aubergine and potato casserole that says: “Good, but needs something else. Lime?”
She thought everything, sweet and savoury, could be lifted by a dried apricot. She was extremely experimental but eschewed basic principles, such as parboiling, or meat being roasted for a specific amount of time, relative to its weight, rather than “for ever”. She loved cardamom.
So when she died earlier this year, I figured many things would make me think of her, but none of the things would be edible. The only food-related thought I could conceivably have would be: “Thank God I never have to eat that almond soup again, which had an egg in it, but also an apricot.”
I’d reckoned without her apple tree. There’s something wrong with it. It’s just a regular-looking tree, but it produces enough apples to power an army over a mountain. For three months of every year, I could never go and see her without her saying, “Please take some apples,” and handing me a crate too large to get in a car, and I would say, “No, nobody in my family likes apples and I don’t even like fruit,” and she’d go, “How about just these 37 apples at the top?”, and I’d go, “No.”
Of course, this autumn, I’ve been possessed by the need to finish them all. I’ve made crumbles big enough for a football team, I’ve been leaving flapjacks on people’s doorsteps and hoping for the best, I’ve eaten vast amounts of things that are apple-adjacent (pork, oats). As the season draws to a close and the tyranny lifts, I can’t stress enough: eat your mother’s apples while she’s still alive. They’re quite tasty.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
