Apple Sauce

There's a smell that comes off a pan of Bramleys collapsing in butter that belongs to autumn and to nothing else. Cold, slightly tart, faintly perfumed with orchard. It arrives in the kitchen about eight minutes in and tells you, without any fuss, that the rest of the meal is on the right track.

Apple sauce is one of those things people forget how easy it is. You can buy it in a jar, of course, and there are perfectly decent ones, but a jar of apple sauce will never taste like apples that softened on your own hob fifteen minutes ago. The difference is the sharpness. A good homemade Bramley sauce has a clean, fluffy bite to it that wakes up everything else on the plate. It's not pretending to be a dessert. It's there to do a job.

The job is pork. Specifically, the rich, fatty business of a roast belly or a shoulder with proper crackling, where the meat needs something cold and sharp to cut against. The sauce does for pork what mint sauce does for lamb. It steps in, makes its point, and steps back.

This is barely a recipe. Apples, a knob of butter, a spoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt. Twenty minutes of mostly leaving things alone. I wrote it down in the notebook once and the entry just said: "Bramleys. Sunday. Pork. Right." That was enough.