It's been a great year for apples. Yields have been up and the size and quality of this year's fruit is worth shouting about. The apple harvest has been so good we should all be eating English apples and cooking with them too.

Sadly this is not happening. Although the UK apple market is now worth more than £320m, only 30-35 per cent of the eating apples sold in the UK are home grown. A total of £78m is spent on Bramley apples that are used for cooking. Unfortunately, only 78 per cent of shoppers appear to recognise the Bramley as being British, while nearly 60 per cent believe the Granny Smith (which is not grown in the UK) is.

Bramley apples are so easy to recognise. They are the largest apples on show - some of this year's crop are so large you only need one to make an apple pie. As the UK is the only country in the world were the Bramley flourishes, we really should be celebrating its amazing qualities, as this is the apple that provides a wonderful fluffy flesh when cooked. No other apple should be used to make an apple pie.

When was the last time you enjoyed a slice of apple pie? I don't mean a ready-made pie that has to be defrosted before you can eat it, or one ready-baked, leaving you with nothing to do but tear away the wrapping paper. I mean an apple pie that infuses the air with a glorious heady fragrance as it's pulled out of the oven brimming with the creamy flesh of Bramley apples and makes your mouth water at the very thought of sinking your teeth into its crumbly shortcrust pastry.

There was a time when apple pies were one of the first dishes a child learned to cook, either at school, or by helping mother in the kitchen, as the taste for apples is one of the earliest and most natural of all inclinations. Now there are very few children who know how to make an apple pie and, I regret to say, very few mothers either.

Apple pie recipes go way back in time, as apples have been abundant here since they were brought over from Europe during the Roman occupation.

A 1381 recipe - for to make Tartys in Applis - calls for good apples, good spices, figs, raisins and pears. Saffron was also used to colour the pie filling. Notice there was no sweetener in this recipe, not even honey which was widely available. The absence of sugar in early English recipes may have been because cane sugar imported from Egypt was not widely available in the 14th century, or (as many food historians suspect) because our forebear's palates were more attuned to sour dishes than ours.

The apples they would have used then would have been a variety of crab apple or wild apple (Pyrus malus), the wild ancestor of all the cultivated varieties of apple trees.

Now we use Bramley for our apple pies, named after Matthew Bramley who purchased a cottage with an apple tree in the garden in 1846. The tree had been grown from pip planted by the previous occupant. Graftings from this tree were given to a local nurseryman, Henry Merryweather on the condition that he named the apple Bramley. When fruits from that first Bramley tree were exhibited in 1876 at the Royal Horticultural Society's Fruit Committee, it was highly commended. Now Bramleys are considered the most popular cooking apple in the world.

While most Bramleys are grown in Kent, Northern Ireland and East Anglia, Oxfordshire boasts excellent apple orchards bearing Bramleys too. Q Gardens, at Milton Hill, and Millets, at Frilford, sell Bramleys freshly picked from their orchards and both report an excellent crop this year. Apart from freshly picked apples, both farm shops sell bottled Bramley apple juice crushed on site from the fruits of their orchards. This juice enables the cook to add a touch of that Bramley tartness to the cooking pot. It makes an excellent substitute for verjuice which is made from sour grapes.

Bramleys contain a higher acid content and lower sugar levels than other apples, which is why they have such a superb sharp taste. However, it's their ability to puff up into a pillow of soft mouthwatering flesh that does not need mashing when cooked, which adds to their popularity.

For a book which makes much of pies and provides a new twist to the classic apple pie by adding a couple of ounces of grated Cheddar cheese to the pastry, I recommend Pie. It's by Angela Boggiano (Cassell Illustrated, £20), who dares to add a pie for her dog Barney to the list of recipes. The traditional apple and blackberry pie is included too.

The recipe for a Banbury apple pie can be found in the Around Britain Dairy Cookbook (Eaglemoss Consumer Publications, £8.99), printed to celebrate British Food Fortnight. This recipe adds flavour to the traditional apple pie by sweetening it with brown sugar rather than white and adding a pinch of cinnamon and grated nutmeg to the filling. The cheese and apple parcels also featured in this book are worth making too. Served warm as a lunch dish, they are delicious.

You have to travel to Upton, near Didcot, if you want a drink which has been described as having an apple pie aroma. It's here that award-winning cider-maker Robert Fitchett and his wife Val make cider that is considered to be the best in England. Robert makes his cider in the time-honoured way and gets that well rounded flavour for which it's famed by using 80 per cent cider apples to which he adds 20 per cent Bramleys. Although Robert's orchard covers 16 acres, his cider is so popular now he often runs out before the next year's pressing is ready. If you are passing through Upton, look out for his small hut on the main road where he sells his cider at weekends. It's certainly worth stopping for. What better drink to have with a traditional apple pie than a glass of cider, which also owes much of its flavour to Bramley apples?