There is a line in the Iliad where Nestor, breaker of horses, laments Diomedes as:

Lost to the hearth, lost to the clan, lost to the old ways.¹

It has always struck me that the transmission of culture, from whatever source, in however small a way, is a means of resisting such an accusation. It implies some attachment, care, and concern for a specific place, which, in a world of flows, connections, and endless choice, has given rise to reflection among scholars.² As a cultural geographer, I explore and report back from other cultures. I look at languages, religious beliefs, oral histories, culinary traditions, and relationships with the environment. Less often, I am asked to share and interpret my own culture. In 2024, I led a class on the geography of food and drink at Oklahoma State University, exploring food cultures from places like Mexico, France, and India, examining what we eat today in the United States, and discussing how this connects to the nation’s landscape, society, economy, and culture. Knowing where I grew up, one student asked me: What food comes from the Channel Islands? I may have blushed. What food comes from that tiny archipelago, lying in the shadows of the world-famous food and drink of Great Britain and France (figure 1)? I reeled off a list of a few traditional dishes, including bean crock (pais au four), Guernsey Gâche, and Jersey wonders (mèrvelles). I mentioned the Jersey Royal potatoes, which emerge from the soil in that island every spring, the earliest on the steepest sloped fields, with the best angle to catch the sun. I talked about the Jersey cow, selectively bred for some two hundred years, and now present on every continent. And for a dish close to the soil, bourdélots came to mind, a word I hadn’t uttered since landing in the United States. I insisted they were very plain, but would I make some for the class, my students inquired.

I had learned to cook some traditional island dishes from my grandmother, my mother’s mother. We made apple pie; we made vraic buns; but we had never made bourdélots, though I understood the general principle. The bourdélot is a cored apple baked in a pastry crust. It was popularized at a time when apple orchards covered much of the island, and cider production was an important part of its economy. This was most certainly before the twentieth century, but like much in food history, it is hard to say precisely when. To prepare, cook, and eat bourdélots is to continue a tradition, and the taste of the soft, baked apple—most of all if it is an apple grown in Jersey—is a taste that was enjoyed by earlier generations of islanders. The bourdélot has no official geographical protection of any kind; no dossier has been prepared to itemize and describe its nature and origins. While it does appear in the Larousse Gastronomique encyclopedia, it is described with characteristic brevity as a “baked apple or a pear enclosed in pastry,” which comes “from Normandy.”³ Its last appearance in print may have been in a recipe book produced by the Federation of Women’s Institutes in Jersey in the 1970s (figure 2).⁴ But its existence betokens an apple-producing terroir that is historical and, just, still in use.

In making bourdélots for my class of culinary-geography students, I had the chance to bring terroirto life—an originally French concept that has animated my research over the last 10 years—and to “domesticate” it by applying it to a case study close to, but outside of, France. Terroir is a term that was first used in late medieval Burgundy to interpret the geographical origins of fine wines. In our own century, wine producers in France still tell us that “il faut des grands terroirs pour des grands vins,”⁵ i.e., great terroirs make for great wines. The concept has been widely adopted throughout the world to explain why good wines taste the way they do, and to justify their value in a necessarily exclusive way. No two vineyards, the thinking goes, have exactly the same combination of soil, aspect, slope, microclimate, grape varieties, or ecology; nor are they tended by the same producers with the same philosophies, practices, and traditions; and so a great wine can never be fully imitated.

Terroir protects the product of a particular patch of Earth, be it in Meursault, Burgundy, or Kumeu, New Zealand, with the “age-old distinction between the same and the other.”⁶ According to the French government body INAO, it consists in: “a defined space in which a human community has developed collective farming traditions over time. Terroir is based on a system of interactions between a physical and biological environment and an ensemble of human factors.”⁷ When the late British philosopher and wine lover Roger Scruton described terroir, in poetic, even spiritual terms, he wrote that its matter, its physical stuff, has been made by plants rooted in the soil of that place and then transformed by human labor according to the customs of that place.⁸ For the French, terroir always contains a human story; the history of production in a particular place is practically inevitable in the way it is used, and it is applied to products beyond wine, including fruit, cheese, bread, and meat. This sense persists despite the observation that the historicity and cultural dimensions of terroir get marginalized in the European Union’s regulatory approach to the geographical protection of food and drink, and despite calls from wine’s New World for “scientific” understandings of terroir that extricate its intangible qualities.⁹ Those trends promote the biophysical, tangible, measurable components of terroir well above the perceived, felt, remembered, customary, culinary, and aesthetic components.

The cultural context of the apples from which bourdélots and cider are made in Jersey forms the cultural dimension of the island’s terroir, just as its topography, soil, climate, and ecology form the biophysical dimension. Their interaction over time is, as INAO avers, the substance of terroir, and we can trace its outline. It is quite plausible that Malus domestica (the common apple tree) was first brought to Jersey and Guernsey during their time as Roman colonies (known as Caesarea and Sarnia, respectively).¹⁰ The Romans made cider out of their apples in various parts of Europe, and production of this drink became popular in Normandy and Brittany, on the Channel Islands, and in southern England. Records show that cider was being exported from the islands to England in the thirteenth century, within the context of monastic and ecclesial intercourse; and cider was involved in trade between the islands and neighboring coasts of England and France.¹¹

From the medieval period to the late sixteenth century, Jersey had a “flourishing agriculture except in the years when it was harried by raiders” from overseas.¹² Though in the best cases farms were largely self-sufficient, with some or all of sheep, cows, fowl, pigs, grain, apples, and other crops being raised, there was usually insufficient wood for local building and heating needs.¹³ In a “land of open fields” surrounded by cliffs, dunes, and beaches, wood was sometimes imported from England, “wooden planks [that] washed upon the beach were highly prized,” gorse and bracken were cut as fuel, and “dried seaweed had to be used to supplement wood for fires.”¹⁴ The boom in cider-apple cultivation, however, that began in Jersey in the late sixteenth century, was accompanied by a particular form of orchard enclosure that gradually filled the island with trees. Elms were imported from Normandy and planted around orchards to form separating hedgerows in the Norman bocage style.¹⁵ Banks were built up, and the ditches in between them further widened to create small field patterns, which, while now mostly denuded of apple trees, have persisted.¹⁶

Apple orchards in these enclosed fields spread so quickly that by the late seventeenth century, the island’s government felt compelled to limit the number of fields being turned over to apple cultivation, because of fears that not enough food crops were being grown to feed Jersey’s increasing population and provide royal tithes. In 1673, the States of Jersey passed an act that aimed to prevent the planting of new orchards but allowed for existing ones to be maintained.¹⁷ However, when England exempted Jersey cider from customs duties in 1676, it provided an even more lucrative export market for the product. So in 1681, while the island had to import wheat to ensure bread, not enough casks could be found to contain all the cider that was being produced there.¹⁸ The following year, the historian Poingdestre wrote, “the whole island is in danger of becoming a continual orchard.”¹⁹ The number of skylarks was observed to decrease, “while species such as chaffinches which nest in trees and bushes would increase.”²⁰ Shade-loving species of flowers grew in abundance, with knock-on effects on the island’s insect fauna.²¹

Around 1780, a local expert on cider making, Francis Le Couteur, wrote a book about the practice, which the British Board of Agriculture adopted as an exemplar for cider making across the English Channel.²² Jersey had established a reputation for cider production, not only in the quantity of it produced, but in the perfection of its craft. By 1795, 1,781 hectares of the island were planted in fruit orchards, of which the vast majority were apples for cider production.²³ These orchards appear in pretty rows on the “accurate survey and measurement of the Island of Jersey” drawn up in 1781 at the behest of the 3rd Duke of Richmond, master-general of the British Board of Ordnance (figure 3).

In 1952, G. H. Dury carefully redrew Richmond’s map and highlighted the geographical variation of orchard plantings within the island—heavier in the east than in the west. The placement of orchards reflected the agricultural aptitude of the island, bypassing the coastline with its pounding Atlantic surf and sea spray; bypassing the sand dunes that continued inland on the west and south coasts; and enjoying as much shelter as possible from the frequent severe gales of prevailing westerly wind that the natural historian Frances Le Sueur notes as a limit to growth for many plant species in the island. But it also reflected adaptation: the enclosure of small fields, driven by the division of land among large farming families before the mechanical era; and the widespread planting of elms along field boundaries as a windbreak.²⁴ Archaeologists and cultural ecologists might refer to the combination of aptitude, adaptation, and the transmission of knowledge in the island’s cider production as a form of human niche construction.²⁵ I would contend that we can also understand it as terroir.

There were far more apples and cider produced from this terroir than could be consumed locally; most of the output was destined for export. But apples were consistently and widely used in the islanders’ food and drink. In a late seventeenth-century contract, Syvret and Stephens note a daily cider ration as part of the payment terms for workers;²⁶ and barrels of cider can be spotted in photographs of farm laborers in the fields of late nineteenth-century Jersey. For my grandfather’s generation, in the early twentieth century, a breakfast of hot cider and toast was not uncommon. Stored correctly, raw apples could last through the winter and provide sugar and vitamins; if not prepared in various dishes, they could be cooked down into preserves like black butter (nièthe beurre; very similar to apple butter in the United States); they could be made into cider, and furthermore distilled into apple brandy (made famous in Normandy as Calvados).

In the 1830s, cider was described as being “still the main source of the farmer’s wealth.”²⁷ Local historian Raoul Lemprière writes that 564,768 gallons of cider were exported in 1832; and Crowden that approximately 320,000 gallons were sold abroad in 1836.²⁸ Year after year, the stuff of Jersey’s carefully tended apple crop was consumed by islanders and by people on the other side of the Channel. In 1839, however, Syvret and Stevens report a drop to around 268,000 export gallons.²⁹ Orchards were beginning to be replaced with arable crop production or, where less fertile, left as pasture for dairy cattle. Lemprière writes that by 1893 cider “ceased to be listed among Jersey’s exports, although it continued to be made in the island for local consumption.”³⁰ In the early twentieth century, huge international demand for the selectively bred Jersey cows provided different incentives for farmers; tomatoes were making money; and the success of the Jersey Royal potato saw “half the arable land devoted to the crop” in the 1910s. Yet, the island’s landscape was still full of the hedgerow trees that had sheltered orchards during the cider boom years.³¹ Ditches that had formed between orchards had become rough tracks, and over time were paved as roads. Moreover, apples and cider remained central parts of the island’s culinary traditions in the first decades of the twentieth century, even as the island was urbanizing and culinary habits were becoming more cosmopolitan.

Apple cultivation has left a material imprint on Jersey’s environment that can still be discerned. The suitability of the soil and climate for apple production—the biophysical components of terroir—had been put to economic use over multiple centuries, and the practices and products of apple cultivation were recognizable parts of the island’s culture well into the twentieth century (figure 4). Dozens of local varieties of apple were cultivated and selectively bred in the island, which gave their distinctive flavor to the island’s cider. These included the Gros Romeril and Petit Romeril—apples named after my mother’s family, who were great cider producers in their day. After a massive storm in 1987 felled many of the island’s remaining apple trees, Jersey’s historical society, the Société Jersiaise, planted an orchard in which those historical apple varieties were grafted and kept alive. A few others also planted new, small orchards, including at the Hamptonne Country Life Museum, in the center of the island (cover image). Those trees are mature today, and about as old as me. Unlike me, however, they have stayed rooted in Jersey soil.

Most Jersey farms in the mid-nineteenth century had a trough and press used for making cider. The trough was usually fashioned from blocks of granite; the pink granite that Jersey shares with the north coast of Brittany, and the undersea pluton that connects them.³² Its perdurability means that such troughs are sometimes found today planted with flowers and contributing to the kerb appeal of the properties they sit on. The method of cider production included having a horse pull the crushing wheel over the apples to extract the juice (figure 5), a practice that is still performed at fêtes and special occasions today.

Throughout the twentieth century, local newspapers featured advertisements for celebratory or fundraising soirées where black butter and other apple products would be made, to the sound of music, song, chatter, and laughter. These séthées du nièthe beurre involved people gathering at somebody’s farm or house, preparing the apples, and stirring them with sugar and spices in huge bâchins or cauldrons over a fire all night long, until a thick, sweet, dark preserve was ready in the morning. At these events, too, bourdélots would sometimes be made and eaten, to help give energy to those peeling, chopping, and stirring (figure 6).

Cider, apple pie, bourdélots, and black butter enjoyed fame in Jersey; their quality was considered high, and their production reflected climatic and pedological suitability for Malus domestica. Photographic evidence and surviving material objects show us the equipment, hewn from local granite in some cases, used to crush apples and make cider. But like the parades of the confréries of wine in Burgundy, or the decoration of cows for their seasonal migration to high Alpine pastures, or the annual making of marzipan candies to celebrate Saint Agatha’s martyrdom in Sicily, this collective transformation of apples into specific food and drink products, according to tradition, and in a festive way, demonstrates the close connection of people to the products of their land and indicates the cultural dimensions of the island’s apple-growing terroir.

The way of life of those who worked with, cultivated, and appreciated the fruits of this terroir was celebrated in events such as black-butter soirées. It was also celebrated and satirized in the work of Jersey-French poets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mathilde de Faye, who went by the pen name Georgie, wrote an entertaining account of rural life in Jersey, centered on the weekly auction sale that took place in the middle of the island and attracted many farmers and country folk. In this poem she recounts, in Jersey-French:

Where pastry and good bourdélots are made,
That are big, and melt in the mouth³³

When traditional island recipes were compiled in a book whose cover image speaks to a rural way of life that was already slipping away (figure 2), many apple-based dishes were included. My grandma had that recipe book, and I remember flicking through it from time to time. Apple batter, black butter, apple pie . . . and bourdélots. The recipes transmitted traditions that came from the autumns of old when orchards throughout the island were covered with piles of fruit (figure 7); a taste of that tradition could be had for 25 pence a piece with the bourdélots made by Margaret Perchard and sold at a fair in Jersey in 1981 (figure 8). After my grandma died, I don’t know what happened to her copy of the recipe book. Without access to it, I called my mum to ask about making bourdélots. I wanted to check I had the right idea. How should I make the pastry? When she described the process, she used the Jersey-French word grumeleaus, something I hadn’t heard before. “Rub the flour and butter together until it makes little grumeleaus.” I understood this, though I don’t think either of us had ever written it down. What my mum was saying was rub the flour and butter together until they start to form breadcrumbs—a common step in pastry making. But to hear that word grumeleaus as I started down this road of making an old-fashioned Jersey dish . . . well, it really felt like one of the vernacular “fleurs de terroir” that Le Maistre described collecting when he talked with old Jersey folk to assemble, over decades, his dictionary.³⁴ You take an apple, core it, roll it in sugar (if the apple is not very sweet), and then wrap it in pastry. I remember grandma saying you could even put raisins in the space where the core was. You prepare as many apples as you have in this way, and put them in a hot oven. Then you take them out. The apple will have cooked down some, and the pastry will be a light gold color. There you have bourdélots, which should be eaten warm with cream. That’s what I offered to my students, adding chestnuts to the cream for extra richness.

Today, Jersey’s landscape is increasingly urban, and the influx of global capital, which has maintained its prosperity, is attracted primarily by its British offshore fiscal status, and not at all by its terroir. In the landscape, rows of elm trees at field edges speak to the protection from strong westerly winds that was afforded to young apple orchards during the cider boom. There are many places in the island that bear names resonant of the same boom—Rue de la Presse in St Peter (la presse means the cider press), Les Vergers Farm in St Martin (les vergers is French for “the orchards”), Le Clos de la Pommeraie in St Saviour (pommeraie is another word for orchard), Les Pommiers Farm in St Lawrence (les pommiers means “the apple trees”), and Pomona Road in St Helier is described as “an area shown in old maps as a vale with orchards.”³⁵ At historical fairs and on special occasions, such as at Samarès Manor and the Hamptonne Country Life Museum, horses are led to crush apples in old granite equipment, and black butter is still made from time to time (figure 9). Two commercial cider producers remain in the island, and one—La Robeline Cider Company—takes a great interest in traditional ways of making cider in this part of the world; its proprietors confer with cider producers in Normandy and Brittany, where France’s most famous cider production—much of which enjoys Protected Designation of Origin status—takes place.³⁶

Making bourdélots generated a felt, lived, remembered, and finally troubled understanding of terroir in myself. Like Scruton communing with a place and its past through a glass of wine, the smell of baked apple in pastry evoked Jersey, and did so ineffably more in the past than the present tense. My family had an old, mature orchard on its property for many years. My grandmother made bourdélots for my mother and my uncles when they were children. Before I became interested in wine and started exploring the complexities of French wine’s terroir, cider was my drink of choice, and I follow(ed) the work of La Robeline with interest. But all of this is transitory. The island of Jersey today is a global offshore finance center, and while agriculture continues as a small part of its economy, the cultural change of the last 50 years has been enormous. Jersey-French is still spoken by a small number of people, but its future as a language passed from one generation of a family to the next is bleak. We could note that it is very fine to speak of a historical apple-growing terroir, but if the land is now more valuable for housing, it may literally get buried under concrete.³⁷ Though wine, cider, or bourdélots continue to be made as traditional regional products, is the link to terroir severed, or perhaps sublimated from present to past, once the ingredients come from somewhere else? Have we moved from tangible to intangible cultural heritage, and is Scruton’s spiritual, spectral feeling of terroir all that is left? Perhaps in sharing the bourdélots with my students, both in narrative and edible form (figure 10), I demonstrated the broader feeling of a word—terroir—that is still “not fully domesticated” into English,³⁸ and that, despite its increasingly technical sense among New World winemakers and oenologists, retains a palpable sense of heritage and of home for many French people. I had introduced the terroir of my homeland and some of its culture—so little known elsewhere. Though I was far from my island home, I had avoided the trap of Diomedes, and shared some of its old ways.

1. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1990), 253 (9.65).
2. See, for example, John Tomaney, “Parochialism—A Defence,” Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 5 (2013): 658–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512471235; Susanne Wessendorf, “Local Attachments and Transnational Everyday Lives: Second-Generation Italians in Switzerland,” Global Networks 10, no. 3 (2010): 365–82, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2010.00293.x; Alastair Bonnett, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss (Routledge, 2015).
3. Joël Robuchon, Larousse Gastronomique (Octopus, 2009), 125.
4. It was slightly vexing, when searching for this book online by its Jersey-French title (Bouon Appétit), to be told by Google’s AI that the phrase is “likely a misspelling of the French.”
5. Rory Hill, “‘Local, Loyal, and Constant’? On the Dynamism of Terroir in Sustainable Agriculture” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2016), 347.
6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Pantheon, 1970), xv.
7. “Appellation d’origine protégée / contrôlée (AOP / AOC),” INAO, accessed 7 September 2025, https://www.inao.gouv.fr/aop-appellation-origine-protegee. Translations are by the author, unless noted otherwise. INAO stands for Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité, previously Institut national des appellations d’origine; National Institute of Origin and Quality.
8. Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (Continuum, 2009).
9. Delphine Marie-Vivien, Laurence Bérard, Jean-Pierre Boutonnet, and François Casabianca, “Are French Geographical Indications Losing Their Soul? Analyzing Recent Developments in the Governance of the Link to the Origin in France,” World Development 98 (2017): 25–34, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.01.001; Luca Brillante, Antonello Bonfante, Robert G. V. Bramley, Javier Tardaguila, and Simone Priori, “Unbiased Scientific Approaches to the Study of Terroir Are Needed!,” Frontiers in Earth Science 8 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.539377.
10. John Crawfurd, “On the History and Migration of Cultivated Plants in Reference to Ethology—Fruits,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 5 (1867): 255–76.
11. James Crowden, “Jersey Cider: The Paper Trail—Fragments of History,” Heritage Magazine (Jersey Heritage Trust), 2006, 37–43.
12. Frances Le Sueur, A Natural History of Jersey (Phillimore, 1976), 11.
13. Marguerite Syvret and Joan Stevens, Balleine’s History of Jersey, rev. ed. (Phillimore, 1981), 106.
14. Le Sueur, Natural History, 11; Syvret and Stevens, Balleine’s History, 157.
15. It is possible that new stocks of cider-apple seedlings were also imported from Normandy at that time. See Le Sueur, Natural History, 30.
16. Julia Cliveley, Trees in Jersey: A Guide to the Island’s Familiar Trees and Shrubs (Jersey Association of the Men of the Trees, 1997), 90–94.
17. Etats de l’Île de Jersey, “8 avr. F^o. 48, v^o, 1673,” in Actes des Etats de l’Ile de Jersey 1660–1675, ed. J. A. Messervy (Société Jersiaise Publications, 1900), 85–88, https://collections.societe.je/archive/books/actes-des-etats/actes-des-etats-1524-1700.
18. Raoul Lemprière, History of the Channel Islands (Hale, 1974), 108.
19. Syvret and Stevens, Balleine’s History, 157–58.
20. Le Sueur, Natural History, 12–13.
21. Ibid.
22. Lemprière, History of the Channel Islands, 167.
23. G. H. Dury, “Some Land Use Statistics for Jersey in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Annual Bulletin of the Société Jersiaise 15 (1952): 439–44.
24. Le Sueur, Natural History, 10, 29–30.
25. See, for example, Jeremy Kendal, Jamshid J. Tehrani, and John Odling-Smee, “Human Niche Construction in Interdisciplinary Focus,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1566 (2011): 785–92, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0306.
26. Syvret and Stevens, Balleine’s History, 158.
27. Ibid., 224.
28. Lemprière, History of the Channel Islands, 166; Crowden, “Jersey Cider,” 41.
29. Syvret and Stevens, Balleine’s History, 224.
30. Lemprière, History of the Channel Islands, 166.
31. Le Sueur, Natural History, 13.
32. Syvret and Stevens, Balleine’s History, 224; Fiona Ferbrache, “Island Geologic Connections: Reimagining Guernsey’s Spatial Dynamics Through Land-Sea-Geologic Relations, Past and Present,” Area 56, no. 4 (2024): e12965, https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12965.
33. Mathilde de Faye (Georgie), “Y faut allé es vendues pour vais ses viers anmeins,” Les Pages Jèrriaises, undated, https://members.societe-jersiaise.org/geraint/jerriais/vendues.html. (Poet lived from 1846 to 1926.)
34. Frank Le Maistre, Dictionnaire Jersiais-Français (Don Balleine, 1966).
35. Collette Stevens, Jersey Place Names, vol. 1 (Société Jersiaise, 1987).
36. Throughout Europe, when groups of producers argue for recognition of a specific product with a Protected Designation of Origin (Appellation d’Origine Protégée; Geschützte Ursprungsbezeichnung), they have to assemble a dossier with evidence that includes the geographical boundaries of production and an explanation of how the product is linked to the place it comes from. In France, that link is described as a link to terroir (lien au terroir), and evidence ranges from soil samples, geological maps, and climate data to the role of the product in local traditions, appearances of the product on local menus, and mentions of the product in historical documents.
37. A challenge Daniel Gade also found in the wine growing terroir of Cassis on the French Riviera. See Daniel Gade, “Tradition, Territory, and Terroir in French Viniculture: Cassis, France, and Appellation Contrôlée,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 4 (2004): 848–67, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.00438.x.
38. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “terroir (n. & adj.),” accessed March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4599872462.