Apples

browngirl asked me to write about apples. Since this is supposed to be somewhat personal, I’m not going to take us all to Kazakhstan for the history of apple cultivation, or provide a nutritional analysis—though I am amused at the recent British advice that everyone over fifty should add an apple a day to their current diet, because on the population/epidemiological level it will save lives and have fewer side effects than statins. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about apples compared to oranges or pears or blueberries; “apple” is synecdoche for fruit, a role it’s played for a very long time.

I grew up eating apples the way a lot of kids did, it was something my parents handed me now and then as a snack or dessert, either whole or in applesauce. Once in a while we got my grandmother’s homemade applesauce, pink because she left the skins on while she was cooking it down. We’d go visit, and she would send us home with a prune juice jar full of applesauce, which I liked a lot. I think there was occasional Mott’s applesauce as well, but that wasn’t a big deal—it’s like getting chicken soup from a can, which is food, when once in a while you get the homemade stuff.

I was well into adult life before I started thinking about kinds of apples. I think it was mostly Macintosh and the occasional yellow or red delicious when I was growing up, because those were the default New York area apples. I added Granny Smith for cooking when I started using apples for cooking, and Gala after I tried a few that I got at Byerly’s after a Minneapolis con. (I was surprised to discover recently that people have been raising Gala apples since the 1920s; it apparently took a while for New Zealand to start shipping them to the United States north, and then for American farmers to start growing them.)

Somewhere along the line I noticed the variety of apples at the Greenmarket (the NYC-area farmers’ markets, run by an organization that makes sure we’re getting only local produce). The market in my old neighborhood is small, but two of the farms that come to it are orchards. One of those orchards grows a lot of varieties of apple, old and new; there will be more kinds in April than the supermarket used to have during the harvest season, and a dozen or fifteen varieties in September and October.

We started trying different kinds of apple partly because they were there: it’s late August, and along with the remains of the stored Macintosh and such, there’s something I never heard of, but the sign says “new crop.” Apples keep in nitrogen, more or less, but they’re not going to taste as good after several months. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my memory wasn’t up to keeping track of all of this. I can remember that I like Macouns and don’t care for Red Delicious; that doesn’t mean I’ll remember that I liked NY652, or was it 562, and was unimpressed with NY428. (Cornell University has produced a lot of apple varieties; some of them got onto the market—for sale to people with apple orchards—without ever getting names other than those numbers. )

It’s a little weird writing this in Washington, where I’m having to relearn most of this. It’s not just that the market here has varieties I’d never heard of, instead of the Macouns and Macintoshes I’m fond of (I never expected to find Esopus Spitzenberg, that heirloom variety is apparently susceptible to every known apple disease). It’s that climate makes a difference, not just in whether something will grow, but in what it will taste like. I like New Zealand or Hudson Valley Galas better than Washington Galas, for example, but Honeycrisps grown here are a lot better than the ones that turned up in New York.

The farmer’s market near me doesn’t have as many apple varieties as I was accustomed to—but there’s a tomato farmer who labels all the varieties, so I can pick “Mortgage lifter” or “Paul Robeson” instead of just “heirloom tomato.” Someone else was identifying their nectarines, and having samples of three different kinds so I could decide which I liked best.

There are a few farmer’s market apples left in my refrigerator, which have probably been sitting too long, given that the last market was at the end of November. After that, it’ll be Safeway or Uwajimaya. (Trader Joe’s and the Pike Place Market each have their virtues, but neither is big on varietal apples.)

The traditional* celebration

We had Chinese food for dinner tonight; no movie beforehand, though.

We went with a large group of people, which I think started with Carrie Root and Andy Hooper calling a few friends, and then Andy posted to the Vanguard (Seattle fannish) list on the 23rd inviting anyone who didn't have plans for this evening. It wound up being 13 of us, at a quite good place up in Lake City, Yu Shan. The service was a bit haphazard, and our scallion pancakes arrived after most of our main dishes, but everything was good. They brought enough pancakes with the Peking Duck, the green beans and house fried rice were above average, and the people who can eat spicy praised the cumin lamb highly.

The conversation was also good. I didn't get to talk to everyone, of course (we were at two tables, and there wasn't much movement back and forth). I was next to Carrie, who I think I last got to talk to at length at a Wiscon, back when she lived in Madison. It was also good to talk to Marci and Andi again; Amy Thomson and I didn't get to do much more than hug and agree that yes, we really do want to get together, but she suggested we might want to wait for warmer and/or drier weather.

I've been getting unseasonable amounts of sunlight, but the thing about it being unseasonable is that I don't want to count on it. Instead, I am grabbing it when I see it, even if that means a random trip to Uwajimaya on Monday because I needed a destination. That was well worth it: there was a sun shower, and a fine rainbow from the bus window on the way over, and a fainter one while waiting for the bus back. The baby bok choy was nice too.

cattitude and I also got a couple of hours of sunlight at the Woodland Park Zoo yesterday morning; the angle of the sun made it harder to watch the young short-clawed otters playing. Such a pity. The jaguar cubs we saw last summer are pretty well grown now, and were curled up in pairs, sleeping; they will be moving to other zoos in the spring. (We had planned the trip a few days earlier, because he had the day off, and it seemed like a good way to enjoy the day while staying away from malls and such.)

*For all that "Chinese food and a movie" is a traditional New York Jewish/non-Christian thing to do on Christmas, I'm not sure Cattitude and I ever did the combo when we lived there. He suggested we see a movie, but I didn't want to wear myself out; the bus trip was straightforward, but it did take an hour (and would have taken an hour and a half, on the holiday schedule, if we hadn't made a ridiculously good connection and arrived well before the stated time).