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» The Fossil
CIDER INSIDER
The Frome Fossil
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Ifirst met James Crowden three decades ago. I’d been sent from Fleet Street to interview him about his first – extraordinary – book of poems. We sat beneath an apple tree in his gloriously unkempt Somerset garden and, whilst sluicing off his sheep-shearing gear, he told me about his life. Dartmoor-born, he’d been an Army engineer, then spent a year in remotest Ladakh, then studied anthropology at Oxford before plunging into the forgotten world of the seasonal country labourer. Now he worked at forestry, lambing, shearing and a host of other jobs. Which he was transmuting into poetry.
But at the hub of his world was something else: cider. That’s what made his eyes glint. He spent the autumn pressing apples at Burrow Hill, one of Somerset’s finest cider farms. His poems were full of old orchards and apple mounds, of dripping juices and frothing fermentations, of Brown Snout and Lambrook Pippin. In the years since, the enthusiasm has swelled into a knowledge and understanding of cider that few can match.
So why am I writing about this? Because England’s Apple Day falls on October 21st, and we should all celebrate our greatest national drink. And if you want a jovial, weirdly learned, hands-on guide to the subject, then James is your man. His new book Cider Country takes you on an enchanting journey via Kazakhstan, Ancient Greece and Massachusetts to Much Marcle, Monksilver and Bradford-on-Tone.
The history of cider is brimful with romance (Zeus, Uther Pendragon, Helen of Troy, the Hittites, Bloody Mary and Snorri Sturluson - not to mention Joseph Stalin - all get walk-on parts in Crowden’s book). And the general haze of smocky, rats-in-the-barrel, strawin-the-mouth Adge Cutlery oo-arrism is always seductive. Even so, there have been periods of utter desolation, when the entire culture nearly expired. The lowest point came in the 1970s. The drinks industry, having done its best to ruin real ale, turned its attention to cider. Why, they reasoned, go on using obscure and fiddly cider apples when you can do it more cheaply with juice concentrate, maize syrup and artificial fizz? This is how most massmarket ciders are created today – and why they taste of nowt. But things have changed again. The new century has seen a joyous upsurge in the number of young, ingenious small scale cider makers, and James Crowden has talked and drunk with most of them. No wonder he sounds so cheerful.
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