If there’s anything more seasonal than an apple pie, it’s an apple and blackberry pie, described by Tamasin Day-Lewis as the autumn pie, while Nigel Slater reckons it’s “almost impossible to think of a dish that so accurately expresses the glories of the British countryside in autumn”. Few can fail to have bittersweet memories of past tangles with thorny brambles – one for the mouth, one for the bag – and though it takes a dedicated picker to amass enough to feed a family, they make a happy pair with their seasonal bedfellow, the apple, helping even the most meagre of harvests to stretch a little further. If you’re lucky enough to have a glut, freeze them to enjoy this recipe throughout the winter.

The fruit

The perennially sensible Jane Grigson writes in her Fruit Book that, “when you pick blackberries in the autumn, and gather windfall apples to make this pie, quantity and variety of fruit do not much come into it. You make the best of what you have. This is the way it should be.”

If, like me, you buy your fruit, however, the biggest decision is whether, like Grigson, you believe apple pies are likely to have tasted better before the introduction of the bramley in 1876, or if, as per Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business and the second volume of Slater’s Tender, you favour these cookers for this particular recipe. Grigson herself recommends tart eating apples such as “blenheim orange or belle de boskoop [the latter of which she asked friends to bring from France each January]”, Day-Lewis calls, less prescriptively, for “sharp eating apples” in her book All You Can Eat, and Jane McMorland Hunter and Sally Hughes compromise with a mixture of the two in their book Berries: Growing and Cooking.

Though flavours do indeed differ, this can easily be adjusted with sugar and lemon juice, but the texture of cooking apples is very different from that of dessert varieties. While bramleys break down into a jammy paste when heated, eating apples tend to keep their shape, especially when added to the pie raw, as Day-Lewis suggests. Perfectly pleasant, if time is of the essence, but McMorland Hunter and Hughes cook theirs first, so that the bramleys disintegrate and the dessert apples stay whole but slightly softened. This feels like the best of both worlds: the pureed apples adding moisture while filling the cavity of the pie, and the chunks of dessert apple offering a contrast in texture to the soft berries and bramleys.

Grigson, interestingly, takes a very different approach, cooking down half the blackberries with the apple peels, cores and a generous helping of sugar to produce a fruity syrup that she then pours over the remaining raw fruit. It’s delicious, but only suitable for a plate pie, rather than one encased in pastry, because it makes the filling very liquid.

Flavourings

If you do have time to cook the apples, my testers and I all like Leigh’s approach of frying them in butter and sugar, which adds richness to the filling, and McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ splash of brandy. Neither rather decadent addition is strictly necessary, but both are delicious if you happen to have them to hand.

Slater dusts his apples with a mere sprinkling of sugar, because he likes them “fairly tart”, but he tells readers with a sweeter tooth to heap on “anything up to a tablespoon per apple”. This is a sensible approach – after all, apples, as well as tastes, vary greatly – but however much you add, I’d recommend going for a brown sugar. We find McMorland Hunter and Hughes’ dark muscovado too intensely treacley, but the caramel flavour of Day-Lewis’ demerara or light muscovado works wonderfully with the sharpness of the apple.

The pastry

Everyone uses shortcrust of some variety, and mostly plain, though seeing as Grigson is non-specific, I go for crisp paté sucrée on her pie. A sweet filling, however, seems to me to demand a more savoury enclosure – Slater keeps it light and crumbly with a lard and butter mixture, but we’re sold on Leigh’s softer, yolk-enriched recipe. This is a pudding, after all.

Surprisingly, only a couple of the recipes line the dish with pastry before adding the fruit. In my opinion, a plate pie doesn’t offer a robust enough ratio of pastry to fruit here, but as Leigh notes, “it is a challenge to cook the bottom crust properly: it needs a lot of heat from below, and a fair bit of time”, so it’s worth heating a baking sheet in the oven first to help with this. Sprinkle the top with sugar for extra crunch and, like Slater, you may find yourself moved to wave a little flag in honour of this national treasure.

Perfect blackberry and apple pie

Prep 30 min, plus chilling

Cook 40 min

Serves 6

2 cooking apples

4 crisp, sharp eating apples

Juice of 1 lemon

25g butter

3 tbsp demerara sugar, or to taste

1 tbsp brandy or rum (optional)

300g blackberries, or however many you have

1 splash milk

For the pastry

350g plain flour, plus extra for dusting

1 pinch salt

200g cold butter

2 eggs

First make the pastry. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Grate in the butter, then rub it in with your fingertips until it looks like damp sand.

Mix the flour and salt, then grate in the butter and rub it in, before adding the egg yolks and a splash of cold water.

Separate the eggs, and set aside one white for later (give the other one to the dog, make a tiny meringue, or freeze it for bigger meringues another day), stir in the yolks, followed by just enough cold water to bring the mixture together into a smooth dough; four tablespoons should do it, but add it gradually.

Pinch off about a third and form both lots of pastry into a disc or rectangle, depending on the shape of your dish. Wrap well and chill for 30 minutes.

Peel, core and thickly slice the apples, then sprinkle with lemon juice to stop the fruit from discolouring.

Meanwhile, peel, core and thickly slice the apples and sprinkle with lemon juice.

Heat the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat and add the apples, two tablespoons of the sugar and the alcohol, if using, then fry for about five minutes, until they’ve started to soften. Add the blackberries, turn off the heat and leave to cool completely.

Fry the apple in butter with sugar and a splash of brandy, until soft, then stir in the berries off the heat.

Heat the oven and a baking sheet to 200C (fan 180C)/390F/390F/gas 6 and on a lightly floured surface roll, out the larger piece of pastry to about 5mm thick. Use this to line the base and side of a greased pie dish about 24cm wide, leaving an overhang around the edge, then spoon in the cooled filling.

Line a pie dish with rolled pastry, fill, top with a pastry lid and seal the edges with egg wash.

Roll out the second piece of pastry. Beat the reserved egg white with the splash of milk, brush this all around the rim of the pastry lining the dish, then lay the lid on top, pressing together the two pieces of pastry all around the rim to seal; trim off any excess (if you like, you can roll this again and cut into shapes to stick on top).

Pierce the lid so the steam can escape, bake for about 45 minutes, until golden, then slice and serve.

Brush the top with more of the egg white and milk mixture, sprinkle with the remaining sugar and cut two holes in the top to allow the steam to escape. Bake on the heated baking sheet for 25 minutes, then turn down the heat to 180C (fan 160C)/350F/350F/gas 4 and bake for another 20-25 minutes, until golden. Leave to cool slightly before serving with thick cream or hot custard.

• Is apple and blackberry pie the king of autumnal desserts, or do you have another contender for the crown? Which variety of apple do you like to use, and what else do you like to do with blackberries once you’ve had your fill straight from the bush? And, most important of all, cream, custard… or ice-cream?