Apple Charlotte

There's a point in autumn when the apple trees give more than anyone knows what to do with. Windfalls in the wet grass. A bag of Bramleys left on your doorstep because somebody's tree has done it again and they've run out of ideas. The kitchen starts to smell faintly of fruit even when you haven't cooked anything yet. This is when an Apple Charlotte makes sense.

It's an old pudding and a quiet one. Bread, butter, apples, spice. Nothing you couldn't have found in a kitchen a hundred years ago, and nothing that has been improved since. You cook the apples down until they collapse into something thick and sharp and fragrant. You line a mould with butter-soaked bread. You pack the lot in, slide it into a hot oven, and wait for the house to smell of toast and orchards at the same time.

The drama, such as it is, happens at the table. You invert the mould onto a plate, lift it away, and there it stands: a burnished gold dome, almost mahogany at the edges, the bread gone crisp and caramelized where it met the heat. You cut into it and the apple inside is dense and spiced and barely holding together. Cream poured from a jug, cold against the hot pudding, pooling into the wedge.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago, the first time I made one properly. "Apple Charlotte. October. Raining. Right food, right evening." I still think that's the whole recipe.