Wednesday 4th February 2009
Q: What do you get when you cross the world’s best cooking apple with the best eater?
A: A 25-year wait… followed by the Cobra
A quarter century ago, amateur apple breeder Hugh Ermen had a dream. To produce the world’s greatest 'dual' apple by crossing the best dessert variety – the Cox's Orange Pippin, with the Bramley Seedling - the best cooker.
While commercial breeders, put off by the Bramley's low level of viable pollen, said it couldn't be done, 79-year-old Hugh (then 54) thought differently.
He said: "To get something different you have to try something different. It was always going to be a risk because it’s such a strange cross. No one commercially would touch it, but the result made it all worthwhile."
The task was enormous. Of the 5,000 seedlings Hugh raises annually, 50 will be trialled with just one or two making the grade. But the result was worth waiting for.
Thanks to Hugh's painstaking work the Cobra was born – named after its parents the Cox and the Bramley and combining the best of both of them. The Cobra is a terrific early cooker – ready in early September and then, left on the tree, makes the most delicious dessert apple to pick from mid October onwards.
Meet the Parents
Cox's Orange Pippin: The classic English dessert apple, unsurpassed for the richness and complexity of its flavour. Although introduced more than 150 years ago, its remarkable taste makes it the benchmark against which all other apple varieties are measured.
Bramley Seedling: Grown from pips planted by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, in her Nottinghamshire garden in 1809, the Bramley is the classic English cooking apple. Uniquely it contains a higher acid content and less sugar producing a tangy tasting apple that retains its flavour when cooked.
Marshalls stocks the new Cobra. One tree costs £16.95 with two, or more, costing £15.50. Apple trees are grown on M9 rootstock, chosen to suit a wide variety of soils and give the consistently heaviest crop.
The Cobra is a diploid (not a triploid) meaning it is easily pollinated by other varieties in the same pollination group.
