Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Wild Food guide to Apple Trees along with all the Apple Trees containing recipes presented on this site, with 14 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Cornish recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Apple Trees as a major wild food ingredient.

Apples, Malus spp (crab apples, crabapples, wilding apples) represent a genus of about 30–35 species of small deciduous trees or shrubs in the Rosaceae (rose) family. The genus is native to the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere, including Europe, Asia and North America. Apple trees are small, typically being between 4 and 12m tall at maturity, with a dense, twiggy crown. The leaves are 3–10 cm long, alternate, simple, with a serrated margin. The flowers are borne in corymbs, and have five petals, which may be white, pink or red, and are perfect, usually with red stamens that produce copious pollen with flowering occurring in the spring. A feature of apple-trees is that they require cross-pollination between individuals by insects (typically by bees, which freely visit the flowers for both nectar and pollen) and with the exception of a few specially developed cultivars self-pollination is impossible, making pollinating insects essential.

The fruit is a globose pome, varying in size from 1—4 cm diameter in most of the wild species but being up to 6 cm in M sylvestris sieversii (the Asian wild apple), and 8 cm in M sylvestris domestica (the domestic or orchard apple), and even larger in certain cultivated orchard apples. The centre of the fruit contains five carpels arranged star-like, each containing one to two (rarely three) seeds.

Apart from a few orchards that have become wild the wild forager will normally encounter crab apples (Malus sylvestris, image bottom right) or otherwise they will be wilding apples, trees grown from the seeds of M sylvestris domestica (the orchard apple, right). As these will always be a cross between two orchard varieties you will never know what a wilding apple tastes like and they could be excellent eating or really tart.

References:

[1]. David Evans Notes from field observations, tastings and cookery experiments.
[2]. Huxley, A. The New RHS Dictionary of Gardening. 1992
[3]. Tanaka, T. Tanaka's Cyclopaedia of Edible Plants of the World.
[4]. Lim T.K. Edible Medicinal And Non-Medicinal Plants, Vols 1–8.
[5]. Thomas, G. S. Perennial Garden Plants
[6]. Milner, E. Trees of Britain and Ireland
[7]. Rose, F. & O'Reilly, C. The Wild Flower Key (Revised Edition) – How to identify wild plants, trees and shrubs in Britain and Ireland
[8]. Streeter, D. & Garrard, I. The Wild Flowers of the British Isles
[9]. Clapham, A.R.; Tutin, T.G. & Moore, D.M. Flora of the British Isles
[10]. Phillips, R. Mushrooms
[10]. Phillips, R. Mushrooms
[11]. Jordan, P. & Wheeler, S. The Complete Book of Mushrooms: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Edible Mushrooms
[12]. Bunker, F.; Brodie, J.A.; Maggs, C.A. & Bunker, A. Seaweeds of Britain and Ireland.
[13]. Facciola, S. Cornucopia — A Source Book of Edible Plants