Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.)