Apples of Uncommon Character Heirlooms, Modern Classics, and Little-Known Wonders

380 Pages·2014·38.65 MB·English

by  Rowan Jacobsen

Contents
Introduction
The Portraits
Summer Apples
Dessert Apples
Bakers and Saucers
Keepers
Cider Fruit
Oddballs
Recipes
SLOW-ROASTED BABY APPLES
APPLE PAKORAS WITH YOGURT-MINT CHUTNEY
CHICKEN LIVER PÂTÉ WITH APPLES AND CALVADOS
GRILLED APPLES WITH SMOKED TROUT, FENNEL, AND LEMON
ZEST
LOBSTER WALDORF SALAD
CHORIZO IN CIDER, ASTURIAN STYLE
CHICKEN CURRY WITH APPLES AND ONIONS
PORK CARNITAS WITH APPLE SALSA
DUCK AND APPLE RISOTTO WITH BACON, SAGE, AND FOREST
MUSHROOMS
LAMB BRAISED IN APPLES AND SPICES
SAUSAGE-APPLE-CHEDDAR POTPIE
CIDER-BRAISED CABBAGE WITH APPLES AND FENNEL
BRUSSELS SPROUTS WITH BACON AND APPLES
MAPLE APPLESAUCE
APPLE-LIME CUSTARD TART
APPLES AND ORANGES GALETTE
NUTTY APPLE CRISP FOR A CROWD
LEMON-CIDER SORBET
TARTE TINTIN
BAKED APPLES WITH BOURBON-SOAKED RAISINS
APPLE PIE SQUARES
KATE McDERMOTT’S ART OF THE APPLE PIE
Glossary
Resources
Acknowledgments
Apple Index
Recipe Index
Ten years ago, my wife and I bought a neglected 1840s
farmhouse in Calais, Vermont. For my wife, the attraction
was the wide, worn floorboards and the classic Cape lines.
For me, it was the four acres of meadows.
Both of us liked the history, the fact that you could look at any of the old maps
in the town clerk’s office and find our little black square with a name penciled
beside it: S Laird on the 1858 Beers Atlas; TJ Porter on the 1895. Although we
hadn’t known any of the previous owners, the sense of continuity was
particularly strong on the day in September when we closed on the house. We
drove there and walked around, pinching ourselves. It was crisp and sunny,
blustery with the first hints of fall, and the line of gnarled trees on the east side
of the house was sporting colorful orbs of fruit. Although I hadn’t noticed when
we’d first looked at the house during summer, they were all apple trees.
I grew up in Vermont in the 1970s, where I’d learned that the McIntosh was
the be-all and end-all of apples. Although it was a clear step up from the Red
Delicious and Granny Smith apples in the supermarket, too often it was mushy
and rubber-skinned, and I’d crossed apples off my life list.
But the apples hanging in these trees didn’t look like any I’d ever seen in a
store. In one tree, they were large, round, and striped red and yellow like little
beach balls. In another, they were brown and fuzzy, more like miniature Asian
pears than what I thought an apple was supposed to be. I tried one. It was
strangely dry, yet very sweet, crunchy, and nutty. A third tree was full of
misshapen fruits speckled with red and orange over a background swirl of greens
and yellows. I picked one of these, found a relatively unscabby section, and bit
into it. Juice exploded into my mouth, fragrant with cinnamon and spice. It was
heavenly, and I realized right then and there that I’d been missing out.
That fall, driving the back roads of Calais, I began to notice that an
extraordinary number of the trees along the roadsides were wild or abandoned
apples. Every few hundred yards, the road would be scattered with little green
apples, or big yellow ones, or nearly black ones. I took to sampling every tree I
could reach. Quite a few were spitters, so sour and astringent that I couldn’t even
pretend to enjoy them, but a significant minority were not. Some tasted like
pineapple, some like anise, and they were so much more interesting than apples
I’d tasted before that I couldn’t believe it. The world was littered with
fascinating fruit! Free for the taking! It was as if an apple-centric civilization had
passed from existence, and I was living amid the ruins.
Which was, in a sense, exactly what had happened. Apple culture was a huge
part of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American life. There were few
national apples, but endless regional ones, each adapted to the local climate and
needs—iconic apples like Rhode Island Greening and Roxbury Russet in New
England; Newtown Pippin in New York and Pennsylvania; Winesap and Hewes
Crab in the Southeast; Black Twig and Arkansas Black in the Mississippi River
Valley; Ben Davis and Rome Beauty in the Midwest; Sierra Beauty and
Gravenstein on the West Coast. Each one had been propagated because it did
something superb. Some came ripe in July, some in November. Some held their
shape in pies. Some started off hard and sour, but sweetened outrageously after a
few months in a root cellar. Some had red flesh so full of tannins that eating one
was like biting into a bar of soap, but if you pressed it and let the juice ferment
in your basement all winter, it produced a dry, fragrant cider—the default buzz
of agrarian America.
The New York minister and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, whose
delightful essay on apple pie can be sampled in small servings throughout this
book, described a typical mid-nineteenth-century cellar thus: “On the east side
stood a row of cider barrels; for twelve or twenty barrels of cider were a fit
provision for the year,—and what was not consumed for drink was expected
duly to turn into vinegar, and was then exalted to certain hogsheads kept for the
purpose. But along the middle of the cellar were the apple-bins; and when the
season had been propitious, there were stores and heaps of Russets, Greenings,
Seeknofurthers, Pearmains, Gilliflowers, Spitzenbergs, and many besides,
nameless, but not virtueless.”
The flavors of these apples ran the gamut, from lemon tart to pumpkin sweet,
with lots of citrus, pineapple, and spice notes to bolster that classic apple scent.
The shapes and colors were equally diverse. The Black Oxford looked like a
plum. The Knobbed Russet looked like the love child of an apple and a toad. The
Sheepnose looked like . . . well, you guessed it.
Where did such diversity come from? To our modern eyes, it all seems
suspiciously like the work of some genetic engineer who took the innocent apple
genome and slipped in a gene from a strawberry or a clown fish, but in fact all
the genetic tinkering was done by the apple itself during its evolutionary journey
from the wild forests of Kazakhstan to the fields of Europe and America. The
apple has one of the largest genomes of any food plant, and it’s full of recessive
genes and genetic switches. In every apple seed, the genetic deck is reshuffled,
new combinations of genes interact in mysterious ways, and many traits that
were invisible in the parent may suddenly turn up in the child, or vice versa.
What this means is that apples do not come true from seed. If you grow a tree
from a McIntosh seed, it will have half the genes of its McIntosh mommy, and
half the genes of its mystery dad (delivered as a pollen grain stuck to the hairy
body of a bee), but its apples probably won’t resemble either parent’s. The apple
may not fall far from the tree, but the next generation of apples will be,
genetically speaking, a million miles away. Such “seedling” trees line the dirt
roads, stone walls, cellar holes, and overgrown fields of rural America and rural
England—and have for some time. What I was experiencing along my Vermont
roadsides was strikingly similar to observations made by William of
Malmesbury, a librarian in an English abbey, in the year 1125: “You may see the
public highways decked with fruit trees thanks not to art and industry but to the
very nature of the soil. The land produces fruit spontaneously, fruit that is far
superior to all other in flavor and beauty.”
Actually, most of that spontaneous fruit was fit for little more than hog feed,
but every now and then, yes, a delicious new apple would come along. Since the
time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, we have known that the secret to
preserving that amazing apple (or pear, plum, and most other fruit and nut trees)
is by grafting: snip off a shoot and graft it onto the living rootstock of another
tree. The rootstock acts simply as plumbing, pumping water and nutrients to the
shoot, while the shoot, known as a “scion,” carries the blueprint for all the apples
produced by that tree, which will be an identical clone of the original. A few
years of such grafts, and an enterprising farmer could have a whole orchard of
that new apple. Then his neighbors would ask for grafts of his tasty apples, often
naming them after the original farm or farmer. This is how apple varieties come
into existence, and it is still how they are propagated in nurseries. Every
McIntosh is a graft of a graft of the original tree that John McIntosh salvaged
from the brush of his Ontario farm in 1811. Every Granny Smith stems from the
chance seedling spotted by Maria Ann Smith in her Australian compost pile in
1868.