Bramble and Apple Crumble with a Spoonful of September

The hedgerows have been extraordinarily generous this September. Every morning walk along the lane has brought me home with purple-stained fingers and a basket full of blackberries, fat and ink-dark and smelling of the very end of summer. Combined with the windfalls tumbling from the old Bramley in the garden, I found myself with rather more fruit than I knew what to do with — which, in my experience, is precisely the right sort of problem to have.

This crumble is nothing grand or complicated. It is the sort of recipe that lives in your hands rather than on a page, passed down not through books but through watching someone older than yourself move quietly around a kitchen. You will need roughly 400g of blackberries, three or four peeled and roughly chopped cooking apples, two tablespoons of caster sugar for the fruit, and for the crumble topping: 175g of plain flour, 85g of cold butter cut into small pieces, 60g of demerara sugar, and a small handful of rolled oats if you have them to hand.

Begin by tumbling the fruit into a deep baking dish and scattering over the sugar. For the topping, rub the cold butter into the flour with your fingertips until it resembles coarse, damp sand — do not hurry this part, it is one of the quiet pleasures of a slow kitchen. Stir through the demerara sugar and oats, then scatter the whole lot loosely over the fruit. Bake in a moderate oven at 190°C for around 35 to 40 minutes, until the top is a deep, nutty gold and the fruit is bubbling darkly at the edges.

Serve it warm, with a generous pour of cold double cream or a spoonful of clotted cream if you are feeling indulgent. I had mine last evening by the kitchen window as the light went amber and the first proper chill of the season crept under the door. There is something about the smell of baked blackberries and brown sugar that feels almost like a conversation with the year — a gentle acknowledgement that the turning has begun, and that there is beauty in it.

Do make it this week, while the blackberries are still there to be gathered. The hedgerows will not wait for us, and neither will September.