“Crab, scrab, bittersgall, gribble, sour-grabs, scarb, scrogg.” Not the relief fire brigade team from Trumpton, but county names for the crab apple, courtesy of Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora. Such a list indicates a fruit that has enjoyed a long association with man or, at least, Englishmen.
In fact, being a plant of temperate climes, it is likely to have been an early coloniser of Britain once the ice had receded, and evidence of its early use exists in the form of pip marks on Bronze Age pottery. I wonder what those ancient people would have thought of the infinitely superior russet…
With no such comparison to make, they were probably content enough with the flavour, and certainly with the enormous number of crab apples produced by a well-appointed tree…
