Midnight Crumble
An essay by Marianne Brooker on the neo-feudal reality of life in a ‘commune’, plus a recipe for apple and raspberry crumble. Photographs by Marianne Brooker and Georgia Rudd.
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Cooking from Life is a strand of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world; cooking as refusal, heritage, messiness, routine.
This week’s Cooking from Life is by Marianne Brooker. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.
Midnight Crumble
The neo-feudal reality of life in a ‘commune’. Words by Marianne Brooker. Photographs by Marianne Brooker and Georgia Rudd.
We ate together on Mondays. Around twelve of us – gardeners, carpenters, builders, foresters, chefs, musicians, and those of us with less singular vocations – gathered around two farmhouse dining tables pushed together in the shape of a T. We took it in turns to cook, each of us dropping £2 into a porcelain chicken to pay for the next week’s ingredients. An ageing aristocrat in shabby clothes and a beaten-up hat sat at the head of the table. Every week, he dropped in £2 of his own and totted up our ‘hours’, a crude exchange of time for space. The house was his, and the rest of us occupied a shifting position, somewhere between worker and guest, tenant and friend.
The aristocrat had inherited the Devon estate from an aunt years before. By the time I moved in, it mixed baroque architecture and Italianate terraced gardens with didgeridoos and tattered banners warning against the harms of genetically modified food. The kitchen walls were papered with photographs – smiling faces and wide eyes, weddings and festivals, activists pushing against police lines. This fading grandeur held a radical promise.
The estate was an experiment in alternative living, sustainable horticulture, and renewable energy. Its grounds were split into distinct quarters, each with its own pattern and character: ornate lawns bordered with exotic flowers, a walled kitchen garden with uniform, stoically separate beds, a permaculture garden in which tall fruit and nut trees nourished a tangle of shrubs and salads below. Each space embodied a particular way of living: decorative, disciplined, diverse.
You could draw a line clean through the middle of the house: half was lived in – shared between the aristocrat and those of us he indiscriminately referred to as ‘the hippies’ – while the other half was for show, set up as it would’ve been one hundred years previously. On weekends, tourists peered through the windows to find me sitting on top of the Aga, warming my feet in its gentlest compartment as if they were loaves of bread. We lived between layers of history, squatting in some period drama of new-age feudalism – still beholden, despite the utopian frills, to landed gentry. ‘Landed’: meaning to inherit and own land and live off its rental income; meaning to have landed, feet on solid ground.
We grew food mostly to feed ourselves and to sell in the estate’s café, which was open to the public. There was a pecking order: the aristocrat got first pick, gardeners the next; the rest of us would share what remained – generally a lot of potatoes, courgettes, and squash. In summer, the salads were the most plentiful: plump tomatoes, cucumbers with thick skins, nasturtiums with bright, edible petals – oranges, yellows, and flecks of purple. What I thought of as the most prized of our fruits – raspberries – were grown in cages (protected from peckish birds, tourists, and residents).
Locals referred to the house as a commune, but there was a tacit distinction between landlord and labourer, however eccentric our practices of shared living and sharing food. The aristocrat’s family owned a raft of local beaches, businesses, and houses. Most of us living on the estate didn’t pay rent, but neither (for the most part) were we paid wages; our work guaranteed our tenancy, week by tentative week. We lived in outbuildings, caravans, cabins, annexes, or rooms in the main house (there were around twenty bedrooms, although not all of them were habitable). Exactly where you ended up was decided through sheer luck – or its opposite. Some people were long-term residents, raising young families or growing older together; others stayed for a season, coming and going with the swallows.
My mum, sister, and I arrived at our first Monday meal in the winter of 2010, equal parts hopeful and awkward. Our previous landlord wouldn’t renew our tenancy because my mum – who had recently been made redundant and diagnosed with multiple sclerosis – would need to sign on to Housing Benefit. The council was unresponsive, and friends could only take one or two of us together. Our options were becoming fewer and further between; soon we’d have to split ourselves across other people’s homes, like three points of a triangle pulled out of joint.
I’d seen the aristocrat at a nightclub, and a friend had told me that people lived on his estate for free. Later that night, perched tipsily on the kitchen counter, I told my mum and, ever resourceful, she emailed the estate office the next day. We arrived for dinner the following Monday and moved in that same week. No contract, no deposit: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Officially, we were guests with no official address – makeshift kings in a land beyond our rule, homeless in a house steeped in age-old wealth. We weren’t the first people, or the last, to arrive in such a whirlwind. Two months in, as was customary, the group of residents voted to let us stay.
We lived in a small flat at the top of a narrow staircase, which was ominously referred to as Jacob’s Ladder. The rooms were the old servants’ quarters, with windows positioned just above head height so that you could see only treetops. The first morning I woke up there, a February chill had topped the glass of water by my bed with a thin sheet of ice. Undeterred, we painted the walls as if they were our own – purple, pink, white – proud that we’d kept the wolf from the door. In spring, the smell of wild garlic clung to every surface and white flowers flecked the grass. At solstice, we stretched the day thin, drank ourselves dizzy, and danced into the night, disguising our debt.
I learned to cook by working in the café at weekends, using its industrial kitchen equipment to make feasts for the Monday meals. We prepared food in vast quantities. Me: lasagnes with roasted vegetables, fresh pasta, and goat’s cheese, enchiladas heavy with broad beans and hot with chilli, and homemade pizza with a base that never stretched but grew thick and puffy in the oven. My mum: cakes upon cakes – wedges of lusty red velvet slathered in buttercream, dark chocolate brownies richer than banks. Cooking gave me a sense of purpose and place, and I discovered new tastes and textures: the sharp arrow of asparagus, the tough petals of artichokes, the zesty tang of cucamelons.
The motley crew of housemates became an extended family: generous, raucous, fractious. But after a year or so, I moved away to university. Around the same time, my mum, less and less able to manage the stairs and the work, started renting a small cottage owned by the same estate for just below market rent. From there, she baked cakes to sell to the café or to gift to friends for birthdays, crafting novelty scenes from sheets of coloured icing. Always industrious, she welcomed me home with enormous vegetarian dinners, their portions served up in slabs, each teetering plate liable to collapse. No stranger to bulk and budget cooking, she intended for food to be shared.
One year, for her birthday, I printed out all my mum’s favourite BBC Good Food recipes and fastened them in a light blue plastic folder. She kept it stuffed behind the kettle, adding in new recipes she’d scrawled on the back of envelopes or torn from supermarket magazines. Mostly we just made it up. Our family recipes are an improvised legacy, whipped up more from memory than measure. My mum’s favourite was for apple crumble, which I later supplemented with raspberries, as if finally freed from their garden cage. Cheap but sumptuous, it’s a dish of contrasts: sharp and sweet, soft and hard.
After we left the estate, we swapped the tradition of Monday meals for midnight meals, fresh vegetables for frozen, hippie dals for hearty casseroles. My mum was poor, barely surviving on benefits – the greater portion of which didn’t go to her, but to her landlord: the aristocrat. Despite this, she never lost her taste for variety and experimentation. On late nights, after my coach home from London had lurched to the bottom of her road, we’d stay up digging into seconds, talking long into the night.
As much as she could, my mum made the place her own. From her cottage, she tended to her garden and planted flowers, and even rescued a clutch of scrawny ex-battery hens, feeding them up until they were fat and happy. The aristocrat visited periodically with gossip and bags of bolting spinach. She still regarded him and his big house with cap-doffing fondness, but I grew cynical. Let it crumble, I often thought.
Midnight crumble
Serves 6 (or fewer, if you keep going back for more)
Time 40–45 mins
Ingredients
for the filling
3 Bramley apples (or another similarly sharp variety; around 600g in total)
350g frozen raspberries
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2.5cm piece of ginger, grated
½ lemon, juiced
3–4 tsp light soft brown sugar, to taste
for the topping
170g plain flour
100g fridge-cold margarine (the butter-like blocks are best)
75g light soft brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
25g rolled oats and/or 25g chopped nuts (whatever you have or prefer)
to serve
ice cream
Method
Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan. Peel, core, and quarter the apples, then chop them into thin slices (around 2cm). Transfer the slices to a wide, deep baking dish and mix in the rest of the filling ingredients.
To make the topping, put the flour into a mixing bowl. Chop the margarine into chunks, then add to the bowl. Use your fingers to rub the flour into the margarine, trying not to let the margarine melt, until the mixture has a breadcrumb-like consistency.
Stir in the sugar, cinnamon, and oats or nuts (or both), then sprinkle the topping over the apple and raspberry filling.
Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 25–30 mins, turning halfway through, until the topping is golden-brown and the fruit is bubbling.
Serve, still hot, with ice cream.
Credits
Marianne Brooker is a writer based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning on climate and social justice. Her first book, Intervals, won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. She’s interested in craft, feminist and abolitionist approaches to care, and the connections between nature, storytelling, and social transformation. She’s working on a novel.
This recipe was tested by Georgia Rudd.
If that isn't one Hector Christie at Tapeley Park I'll eat my battered hat. Was treated to some very David Brent esque comedy from the big man at one of their Health and Harmony festivals. Always loved the vibe of the place but there was something vaguely problematic/exploitative about it, thank you for articulating this. He really showed his arse in recent years by going on TV / to the Daily Mail with a 'Kick out the Hippies' campaign. I don't remember the details, if it came to fruition or was more of a publicity stunt.
Fascinating story, feels as though it should have been in the 70s. Let it crumble indeed - and then let’s eat it!