Fete de Pommes

I don't like apples but do like apple pies. We make them here very often. Instead of cooking apples we use different varieties.

I use all kinds of apples for my apple pies as well Costas. When I lived in England I always used Bramleys and I must say I miss them for my chutneys as they "fall" better than any others.

we've very old unnamed appletrees which are lovely to eat off the tree-- but not keepers ( no good for 'supermarkets')
my french friend made us a gorgeous 'Tarte Tatin' now thats not dry!.....

I love Tarte Tatin....all that lovely caramelised apple...small dollop of ice cream...made myself hungry now!

Excellent apple displays!

Fascinating fête, Troddles ...
.. good set of pics :o)

Great pics Troddles..apple pie hmm i always use Bramleys when i make one..which is not often enough says OH..:O)

Great fete ove the pictures and Im feeling a little hungry at the thought of Tarte Tatin with Ice Cream sounds very yummy ;0)

lovely place, thanks for sharing, who needs the turner prize when you can bump into an apple octopus like this?
Would love any one of those tractors.

Troddles , what a lovely blog , the French really do the fe^te bit well don't they . We don't seem to celibrate our produce enough here do we ? I know Mirpois and Foix , we spent 2wk inthe area a few years ago .

Love the apple displays, credit to all the people who have the patience and skill that goes into putting them together.
Thanks Troddles for sharing your pics...

So pleased you enjoyed the pics. You are right Driad we do not appreciate in the UK what we have. We grubbed up most of our orchards years ago, but I do hear there is a bit of a revival, I really hope so.

I do love these French Fete, we went to a Langoustine one on the Ile d'oleron.......the apple photos are great, do not know the area you live in.

what a lovely and interesting blog ~ thank you for putting it on here.

We missed Bramleys terribly when we moved out here - Italian apples are pants. The two best-selling varieties here are "Grenni Smit" and "Delicius" (Granny Smith and Golden Delicious) So we imported some trees:- we drove them 1,500 kms across Europe in the car roofbox and planted them and a few other both well-loved and some rarer English apple trees up in our little shallow-soiled, sunbaked "orchard", not expecting they would perform as well as they do in their normal, lovely, damp, British orchards, and half expecting them not to survive at all. That was 3 years ago, and this year for the first time we have had a bumper crop off all our trees - IN JUNE! We thought we'd never use them all, but we have! Italians don't really appreciate the virtues of lovely, tart cooking apples and crisp, sweet eating apples, so we play very mean and keep them all to ourselves. I have just enough left in the freezer to make pumpkin, apple and peach chutney. Scrummy!
We used to go to all the local "Sagre" (celebrations of local produce) and very interesting and enjoyable and delicious they were too, but in the past couple of years they have turned into markets for overpriced, imported rubbish - cynical moneymaking exercises, so we stay at home, invite our friends and celebrate our own efforts instead!

p.s. Did you know that there is an international apple tree register to map out all the kinds there are and where they grow in the world? It's fascinating for anyone who appreciates apples.

p.p.s All the farmers round here drive tractors made by Lamborghini!

Our department is the last one at the bottom of France(pushing the Pyrennees and Spain) and directly South of Toulouse Dotty. We are around an hour from Andorra and the Spanish Border.
What a wonderful triumph Gattina, who would ever think that an English Apple would do so well. I must admit we never considered doing this, now I regret it but it's too late. We grow Reine de Reinette which is the nearest to a Coxs Pippin we could find.
Our Fetes are still surviving in their more or less orginal form, probably because this area is extremely rural and quite deprived really, with Toulouse at 100 km the nearest City to us of any note. Carcassonne is 60 km from us but it is only the medieval walled city within that gives it credibility.

Troddles , I too love Gattina's apple story .
G , I have three apple trees , ancient , but very productive .They are all different kinds [I don't know what ] two good eaters and a lovely cooking one . There was a Cox's Pippen , but it grew mistletoe wonderfully [litterally ] the year before it died . I felt that it was a portend of some kind , both when it arrived and then with the rapid departure . [Nothing happened as yet , though .]

We have an apple tree in our front garden Driad, very prolific, very old, but like a cider apple probably grown for the "eau de vie" (the man with the mobile "still" arrives each Autumn...deadly stuff). Last year we saw mistletoe growing on it but so far so good! I use the apples for apple jelly, apple butter and mint and apple jelly as they are so full of pectin.

Wow, fascinating stuff, Troddles. And great pictures to back up teaching us about the existence of such a fete. Thank you. :)

Gosh, Troddles, I wish we had a little man with a mobile still - that sounds a wonderful idea! There are times when I could definitely appreciate a drop of Eau de Vie.
We tried making cider a couple of years ago, but the apples that are grown here are totally wrong, and cider is almost unheard of. I think it's too late to think about planting a load of cider apple trees now, we'd be pushing up daisies by the time we had a big enough harvest to make it worthwhile. Apart from that, I did a silly thing and left our big plastic fermentation barrel inside the summerhouse in the big heat, and it started to melt and distort, along with all my seed trays!
We are reduced to asking friends and relatives who drive across Europe to come and visit, to put bottles of British cider in their car boots, and ration ourselves to the odd bottle on high days and holidays!
We do make our own walnut liqueur, though, and although it's an acquired taste, we have won praise from our Italian friends. Very powerful, very smooth. (The nocino, not the friends!) It does involve picking the green walnuts on St John's day - 24th June - and buying 78° proof fruit alcohol from the supermarket for about €5 a litre. Sainsbury's don't do that yet, do they?

Troddles , what's apple butter ? Is it like the German apfelmus ? What do you use the apple and mint jelly with ?
Gattina , what do the Italians use such strong alcohol for ? Just making liqueurs ? OH says they could put it in their tanks !

Only if you want to blow the side off the mountain! Yes, just liqueurs. Cold winters up here! Oh, and preserving fruit, too. Same difference ;-) Not sure what you pay for fuel in the UK, but €5 a litre is a tad pricey, even for here!

Driad, not sure what apfelmus is...Apple Butter (or Cheese) is just boil apples (around 1 1/2 kilo with about 1 litre water), cloves and cinnamon til soft, then mouli, measure it and for every half litre, add half kilo sugar, then simmer until really, really thick and put in jars. It's great for making strudl and eating wth pork or duck. Mint and Apple jelly is for lamb....naturally :-)))
Love to try your Walnut Liquer Gattina, we tasted it in the Dordogne last year but it was the "manufactured" kind. I bet the homemade is something else!!
The Dutch round here make orange liquer and buy high voltage pure alcohol, it's easy to get in Andorra, I haven't seen it in France though.
You choose your alcohol strength when you take your fruit to the village "still". Just driving past with the car window open nearly knocks you out as the alcoholic fumes waft around!

Oh Wow! Not a day to get breathalysed, then, Troddles. I'm currently trying to make raspberry and black cherry liqueurs by the same method. It probably won't work as well as with walnuts, but it's fun trying....hic! We can't buy a mainstay of Christmases past - ginger wine -here, so I shall be starting on a few bottles of that some time later this month. Orange wine was quite a success. We tried brewing our own ginger beer last year, with spectacularly explosive results. The cellar has never quite smelt the same. It was a shame, the beer itself tasted truly awful, so we had to throw the lot down the sink. It cleared the cess-pit out a treat, though, and the bacteria seemed to thrive on it..