GRANNY Smith is stocking Sydney’s finest fresh pasta. Our first delivery arrived on 16 November and we’re delighted that what The Sydney Morning Herald’s Helen Greenwood wrote of Pasta Emilia some years ago holds true today: ‘No longer a local secret, owner Anna Maria Eoclidi’s marvellously silken flat pasta has a truly homemade Italian quality to it, as does her finely rolled tagliatelle, using organic flour and eggs.’

The stock at Granny Smith is led by Anna Maria’s fresh pasta — linguine, fettucine, rigatoni and strozzapreti — and superbly balanced sauces, including salsa verde and pesto e pomo. It can be found in the fridge. We’ll shortly add Pasta Emilia’s ravioli, including pumpkin, crab and prawn, duck, nettle and seasonal variations.

Anna Maria was born at Castell’Arquato, between Parma and Piacenza, in Emilia Romagna. As Helen Greenwood wrote: ‘Her grandfather was a farmer, producing the staples of the region: wine, wheat, tomatoes, cheese and milk. Eoclidi remembers spending time on her father’s farm or his small vineyard. In the mid 80s, she left Italy to study dance in London, where she met Australian Simon Venning, married him, and came to Australia in 1988. She cooked a lot and did some catering. But it was only when they took their children back to Italy to give them a taste of their heritage that she thought seriously about pasta. They opened a restaurant in Castell’Arquato and a friend began supplying her with the regional specialities: anolini (small, round sun-shapes filled with parmesan), tortelli (filled with nettles), and revioli (filled with pumpkin and mostarda – mustard fruits). Eoclidi decided she wanted to recreate this pasta when she returned to Australia.’

‘To authentically reproduce the flavours she knew as a child, she turned to organic produce. ‘For two reasons,’ she sad in her lilting, accented English: ‘Taste. Vegetables and ingredients seems to lose their flavour if they are not organic. And health’.’

Pasta Emilia is not yet a certified organic maker, but Simon says that Anna Maria and he hope to achieve that following the recent relocation of their kitchen from Bronte to Surry Hills. Anna Maria uses a La Parmigiana bronze disc pasta maker, designed in 1948, to make her pasta. She learned to make and roll dough by hand at the tables of her grandmother, aunts and mother, but demand for her products led to an investment in a machine. Yet there is serendipity at its heart: the bronze die were cast near where Anna Maria was born.

LAST week, in Austin, the capital of Texas, I had an opportunity to meet Whole Foods’ marketing manager Richard Gabaree at the company’s foundation and flagship store. Whole Foods is the world’s largest natural and organic food retailer. My companion couldn’t resist asking Richard for a photograph of the pair of us with some organic Granny Smith apples from the central Austin store’s amazing fruit and vegetable display.

The provenance of food – who grows it, how it’s grown and where it comes from – is as important to Whole Foods as it is to us at Granny Smith. In every department at Whole Foods the staff could tell us the origin of food, from fish to coffee. In the butchery and at the cheese counter, staff proudly told us who produced the lamb or goat chevre that they were offering. The visit reinforced our philosophy that we should spare no effort to ensure that the food we market keeps its identity. If we can achieve that then we’re always reminded of the link between farm and table when we shop for food. It’s the reason we’re always stocking and supporting the promotion of foods like heirloom apples from Orange.

Peter Kenyon

SYDNEY Morning Herald reporter Ben Butler, with Leonie Wood, reports on the cost of keeping cheap chicken on Australian tables in Behind the closed doors of poultry processing. Butler and Wood report on injuries, allegations of maltreatment and bad work practices and the dominance of the processing business by two major companies.

FROM the Fort Worth branch of the Texas food store group Central Market: ‘I am a brown paper bag. More than likely I will end up under your kitchen sink with a few of my friends. I might get cut up and wrapped around an old textbook, or just stuck under something messy. It would be nice if someone made me into a kite. I’d like to be a kite. But whatever happens, I will never forget the day I carried groceries home from Central Market.’

You may remember that we had a delightful surprise at the end of Granny Smith Natural Food Market’s first summer of trading when we received a generous haul of heirloom apples from Orange. In 2003 our store was reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Living’ guide. The review was seen by Borry and Gaye Gartrell, heirloom fruit orchardists and winemakers, who farm some magnificent country on the slopes of Mount Canobolas near Orange in central western NSW. My experience of community-supported agriculture, mentioned in the article, encouraged them to bring me some of their fabulous apple varieties. Everyone raved about the beautiful, developed flavours of the fruit. Like most fruits and vegetables, true heirloom varieties rarely make it to market. With more than 170 varieties of apples growing at an altitude of 1000 metres, Borry knows them all. Some are perfect for apple sauce, some for drying, some for eating fresh, some for cider. Some are super-early, ripening in January, and some – like Granny Smiths – can still be on the trees when the first snow falls on Mount Canobolas in May.

I’ve been intending to go up there each year to get some more of this amazing fruit but, being busy, it never happened. That is, until late March 2011, when I drove to Orange. Though the apple season was mostly behind us, the next-to-last of late season fruit was still on the trees, having grown slowly through the warmer months to become fully-flavoured. I helped Borry pick three late season varieties: Democrats, Roman Beauties and King Davids.

A few weeks later I returned for the last of the Cox’s Orange Pippins – the world’s finest dessert apple, Lord Lambourne, Lady of the Snows, the superb Carrington, and Buncombe. By this time – late in March – some of the Borrodell apples had developed a honey core: golden and juicy through the centre, like honey comb, the hallmark of intense flavour development in fruit still on the tree.

Lord Lambourne is described on authoritative website orangepippin.com as one of the earliest of the season’s English-style dessert apples. Carrington ‘Early’ is described by a Tasmanian orchardist as a ‘Christmas apple’, small, red and with bland white flesh. This is not how I would rate the Carrington picked from Borry’s orchard this autumn past. Beautifully crisp much after Christmas, it was superb. Buncombe – also known in North America as Red Winter Permain or Red Fall Pippin – is thought to have been raised in North Carolina in the 1800s. It is described as a high quality dessert apple.

We’ve been very pleased at Granny Smith’s to enjoy a wonderful response from customers to our stocking – albeit for a short season – these heritage apples from Orange. One customer ordered a case of Bramley’s Seedling. She was overjoyed to find that someone not too far from Sydney was growing this quintessential English cooking apple. The intense acidity of Bramley’s guarantees, when cooked, ‘the lightest and fluffiest of purees’, according to orangepippin.com. England remains the only place in the world where a distinction is made between ‘eaters’ and ‘cookers’ among varieties of apple. Bramley’s is undoubtedly the perfect ‘cooker’.

Links
Borry and Gaye Gartrell’s Borrodell on the Mount heritage apple orchard
Heirloom apple authoritative website orangepippin.com