Evidently 60 varieties of apples are not enough.
Last apple season, I counted 60 varieties of apples sold at the Union Square Greenmarket and wrote about it in a blog entry, "The Big Apple."
(Of course 60 varieties are but specks of sand on the beach: the forthcoming seven-volume encyclopedia, The Illustrated History of Apples in North America, identifies 17,000 apple varieties grown between 1623 and 2000.)
This season, I've seen four new varieties: the bland and crisp SnapDragon, an offspring of Honeycrisp created by Cornell University's apple breeding program; the very decent (and remarkably blight-resistant) Crimson Topaz; and - let's cut to the case - much more interesting Pink-A-Boo and Pink Delight.
Don't confuse either of these Pinks with Pink Lady, a fairly random Golden Delicious offspring also known as Cripps Pink. They are far more intriguing.
From the outside, Pink-a-Boo looks nice enough. The photo above could be of Granny Smiths or another green apple that sometimes has a rosy cast. But it's the insides that count here.
Cut open a Pink-a-Boo and discover its Cherry Vanilla surprise!
Our other fascinating newcomer, Pink Delight, looks like many other reddish apples from the outside, distinguished mainly by being a bit less photogenic than usual (even for low-spray apples).
But inside, Pink Delight had the same marvelous surprise!
I had never heard of red-fleshed apples until this season, but the eccentric British website suttonelms.org.uk lists many varieties, mostly with charmingly lurid names - Red Love, Red Moon, Scarlet Surprise, Purple Passion, Purple Wave, Vampire, Firecracker and Red Devil. A red-fleshed apples few go the Disney route, with names like Pink Sparkle, Pink Beauty and Pink Princess. Here's the site's description of Pink Pearl:
Rich flavor..the flesh is an attractive light pink and white. The apple is to my taste but if it was put in a child's lunch box it would probably be half eaten.
A comment about the plan for Tesco, a major British supermarket chain to carry red-fleshed apples (yes, I'm envious) included this pithy description of the apples:
They look pretty damn insane yet wonderful.
Most red-fleshed apples are believed to be descended from malus niedzwetzkyana or Niedzwetzky's apple, a wild apple native to the Caucasus with red leaves, flowers and flesh. Beginning in the 1920s, Albert Etter, a California horticulturalist, used the Niedzwetzky offspring Surprise (sometimes called Surprize) to breed around two dozen red-fleshed apples. In case you were wondering, the red color of red-fleshed apples are caused by our good buddy anthocyanins, the antioxidants also present in a variety of deeply-pigmented produce, including purple cabbage and sour cherries.
And what about the taste? Pink-A-Boo, the smaller apple above, has more dramatic coloring than Pink Delight, but rates only a "pretty good" in flavor. In other words, I wouldn't rush to buy it for myself if I had better alternatives -- and considering the only place I could buy it is Samascott's stand at the Greenmarket, which consistently has an incredible selection, so of course I would have better options. But I'd still buy it as a gift for others or simply to wow them.
Pink Delight is another story. Close your eyes and open your mouth. Pink Delight (okay, one you pare off the blemishes) tastes like the Granny Smith of my dreams (but seldom found in real life). Tart, but not astringent. Deep in its apple flavor. Desirable beyond its superficial charms.
I can't wait to see what Apple #65 is like.
My beloved Union Square Greenmarket may be my muse, but I have eyes for other other cities' markets as well. I recently wrote about Washington DC's markets, and perhaps I'll write about Philadelphia's, especially the historic Reading Terminal Market (although, let's be honest, it's the pretzels, not the produce, that make Reading Terminal one of my favorite destinations in Philadelphia). But none of these East Coast cities had farmers' markets with the Wow Factor of San Francisco's.
Yes, I'll admit it. San Francisco's markets were better than anything New York had to offer. Hard to argue with California soil. One item of produce, however, helped me hang on to my New York chauvinism: the apples. San Francisco's markets had neither the quality nor the range of New York's. Even as I oohed and ah'd about dozens of other fruits and vegetables, I actually felt a little homesick - for The Big Apple.
We New Yorkers certainly take our apples seriously here. But - as I found out when researching the nickname for this blog post - the term "The Big Apple" has nothing to do with apples. Instead, the name dates from the 1920's, and derives from the slang use of the word "apple" to mean racetracks and their prizes. NYC, as a big city, had a Big Apple. The term was later popularized by jazz musicians and made official by a New York City tourism campaign.
Of course, the tourism wouldn't have been very effective if the apples weren't so good!
My father-in-law, who hails from area of Vynohradiv in Eastern Europe, has spoken longingly of the range of apples he recalls from his youth. "You'd go to the market and you'd see 16, 20 types!" he recalled. This inspired me to conduct my own census of the apples I've seen over the past couple of months at the Union Square Market, from early ripening varieties like Ginger Gold to still-lookin'-good-in-winter stalwarts like Granny Smith. The count to date: 60. Yes, 60 varieties! (Take that, Heinz!)
Not only is the list long, it turns out that the apples' family trees are the stuff of soap operas or long Russian novels. The supermarket staple Golden Delicious (perhaps my least favorite apple on this list), for example, is descended from the Grimes Golden and is a parent, along with the York Imperial, of the Nittany apple. (Not surprisingly, botanists at Penn State University, home of the Nittany Lions football team and many other Nittany-named associations, were the midwives of this variety.) This one offspring was plainly not enough: Golden Delicious is also a parent of Jonagold, Cameo, Pinova, Arlet, Mutsu, Pink Lady and Elstar (just to name varieties that were available at the Greenmarket).
Other varieties have intriguing histories.
Newtown Pippins grew along Newtown Creek, an estuary between Queens and Brooklyn, in the early 1700s (well before - nearly 300 years - the area was designated a Superfund site). Later the variety was exported to Great Britain, where it gained a fan in Queen Victoria. Nowadays Martinelli's boasts of using Newtown Pippin apples in its juice.
Wikipedia's entry for Newtown Pippin identify it as a parent of Ginger Gold, a late summer apple (that might be the official apple of Brighton Beach); but the Wikipedia entry for Ginger Gold, meanwhile, identifies its parents as "Golden Delicious, Albemarle Pippin and some other unknown variety," with no mention of good ol' Newtown. Oooh, intrigue!
The range of apples sold at the Greenmarket includes both traditional "heirloom" varieties - basically, varieties like McIntosh that were discovered a long time ago as seedlings, then cultivated - and hybrids that are the result of formal apple breeding programs, such as the one run by New York's Agricultural Experiment Station (AES), an affiliate of Cornell University.
When you go to the market and see a new variety like the AES's Ruby Frost, it's easy to assume that breeding programs are a recent invention, but the AES was established in the 19th century! One of its apples, Cortland, was was introduced 100 years ago. My beloved Macoun, a cross of McIntosh and Jersey Black (an otherwise little-known variety), is another AES product, as is Empire, a McIntosh/Red Delicious hybrid.
Nowadays one of the big breeding success stories is Honeycrisp. produced at the University of Minnesota. I had already known that Honeycrisps are usually the most expensive apples in the market, and that they have their own dedicated website; in the course of writing this blog entry, I also learned the very relevant fact that the University of Minnesota patented the Honeycrisp and reaped $10 million in royalties from the apple. Honeycrisp's parents are Macoun and Honeygold, itself a hybrid of Golden Delicious and Haralson, a notably hardy variety named after the former head of the University of Minnesota apple breeding program.
What's the point of all this tinkering?
We're a country that loves new 'n' improved, so perhaps it's a self-explanatory phenomenon.
From this fascinating - at least to a fruit nut like me -presentation about apple breeding, I learned that breeders especially fiddle with sweetness, hardiness, crunch, vitamin content, disease and insect resistance, and marketability. A crisper, hardier version of a Macoun would be a commercial success - especially if it could be shipped all over the place. As the reviewers on this apple info site note, folks who live outside of Macoun territory bemoan their loss! But for me, Honeycrisp isn't an improvement over Macoun. It certainly tastes sweeter - the great restaurant critic Robert Sietsema claims that Honeycrisps have been bred to "have a sugar level way higher than other apples" - in keeping with the modern tendency to manipulate fruits to make them sweeter. A British zoo, for example, recently banned feeding monkeys bananas bred for human consumption, likening them to cake - a far cry from bananas found in the wild.
But to be fair, the manipulation of the sweetness levels of apples has always been an integral part of the crop's history. Apples, a portrait of the fruit by Frank Browning, describes apples' transformation from super-sour "spitters" (fruit so sour you'd spit them out), to the contemporary sweet stuff. The apples we enjoy in New York and throughout the US have their origins in Eurasia and made their way to the US via the notoriously underskilled European settler-farmers. Or, in other words, "The earliest [European] settlers came ill-equipped in almost all aspects of agriculture, save for apples."
These apples were used for cider and medicinal purposes, but increasingly for food as well, which meant cultivating an ever-sweetened apple. As Michael Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire.
The quest to sweeten the typically bitter fruit ignited a grower's frenzy in the 19th century, bringing fame to hundreds of quintessentially American personalities such as the Red Delicious, the Baldwin and the Jonathan. Each iteration of the apple reflected the young country's understanding of itself as a diverse nation of transplants, a new breed of individuals digging new roots into their adoptive soil.
What about heirlooms? Here's how Robert Sietsema described one heirloom variety, Golden Russets, in this ode:
While modern botanists
seek to make apples sweeter, shapelier, and more beautifully colored, heirlooms
stand in sharp contrast. They're often gnarled and brown, and have hard
textures, with flavors that run more to nuts and hard liquor than table sugar
and mass-produced perfumes.
The
Golden Russet is a good example. Bite into it and pecans and maple syrup fill
your mouth, and even, if you concentrate really hard, maybe the soil that the
apple grew in on a sunny hillside near Rome, New York, or somewhere in the
Hudson Valley. "Russet" refers to the brown splotches on the apple,
producing a certain leatheriness to the skin. The flesh is hard; and hence it
takes some chewing to eat, and resounds with a sharp "crack" when you
bite into it. The flavor is delicate, too, the opposite of the newfangled
Honeycrisp, which is a current farmers' market favorite that displays the modern
objectives of hybridization.
Dunno if I'd go that far. I happen to love Golden Russets. Of all the heirlooms I've sampled, they are no doubt the most exotic, the apples that have the least in common with the big, juicy sudsy Washington apples that dominate supermarket shelves. (Washington State is the US's big producer. New York is a distant second. Sour grapes (apples?) on my part? No, my bad experiences with Washington apples is no doubt based upon the combination of varieties I'm not crazy about in the first place (Golden and Red Delicious) and their selection for cross-continental shipping. Maybe I need to taste some apples at Seattle's Pike Place Market to end my grumbling.)
Golden Russets are noticeably light for their size. Normally I choose fruit that are heavy for their size, but that's not really an option for this apple. They're drier and harder than most apples. Their skin is rough and leathery. Perhaps my powers of concentration are less than Sietsema's, but I've never tasted pecan or maple or terroir when eating a Golden Russet. I have, on the other hand, enjoyed a rich apple flavor, tarter and more complex than that of most apples.
After all this apple research and tasting, what did I learn?
- There is sometimes more variety within an apple type than outside it -not a great shocker when you realize how closely related some varieties are.
- Not all heirlooms are great, and not all hybrids are bad news. Prime examples: Golden Delicious is considered an heirloom and Macouns are the results of manipulated breeding. The flip side, of course, is true as well. "Building a better apple" might result in an apple that's better for shipping or resisting blight, not for better taste.
- If you don't like the parents (apple), there's a good chance you won't like the kid (apple) much either. Likewise, if you don't like the kid (apple), you probably won't like the parent (apple) either. For me, not liking Grimes Golden wasn't a shocker since I dislike Golden Delicious. Likewise, since I'm no fan of Golden Delicious nor of Jonathan, it was no surprised to be unimpressed by their offspring, Jonagold. Ditto for the Red Delicious/Jonathan hybrid Melrose, a product of the Ohio State horticulture program. Some vendors thoughtfully mention the parentage in their signs, which saves on having to carry around genealogy index cards. But be open to possibilities. For example, I like Fuji, whose parentage includes Red Delicious (with Ralls Genet), one of my thumbs-down varieties, and I like Cripps Pink (aka Pink Lady), although Golden Delicious is one of its parents. Maybe you need two disliked parents to really strike out.
- Don't judge an apple by its name. Spigold, Honeygold, etc. have Golden Delicious as a parent; Ginger Gold and Golden Russet do not. Ask, read up or throw caution to the wind and simply sample.
- Beware of any apple described as having a "subtle" or "pear-like" taste. While I like actual pears just fine, "pearlike" and "subtle" are code words for "no taste" and "lacks flavor." (See: CandyCrisp, with its sign above.)
- I prefer apple slices to biting into a whole apple. Best of all: quartered with the seeds and encasement removed.
- Taste tests are fun! Apples not only have different skin colors, they have different flesh colors, too. Also, different scents and different textures. Explore, and enjoy! 60 varieties can keep you busy for a good long time.
Were there really 60 varieties? Yes, indeed!
1. Macoun
2. McIntosh
3. Pinova (aka Sonata)
4. Red Delicious
5. Golden Delicious (aka Yellow Delicious)
6. Gold Rush
7. Mutsu (aka Crispin)
8. Ida Red
9. Cripps Pink aka Pink Lady
10. Granny Smith
11. Fuji
12. Golden Russet
13. Calville Blanc
14. Ruby Frost
15. Cox's Orange Pippin
16. Winesap
17. Stayman's Winesap
18. Arlet
19. Cortland
20. Rome
21. Jonathan
22. Jonagold
23. Northern Spy
24. Redspy
25. Ginger gold
26. Gala
27. Braeburn
28. Spartan
29. Empire
30. Chippers
31. Monroe
32. Pendu Plat
33. Melrose
34. Ambrosia
35. Honeycrisp
36. Nittany York
37. Keepsake
38. Candy Crisp
39. Black Twig
40. Winter Banana
41. Eve's Delight
42. Suncrisp
42. Golden Supreme
43. Cameo
44. Spencer
45. Smokehouse
46. Grimes Golden
47. Molly Delicious
48. York
49. Snow Sweet
50. Greening
51. Lady
52. Akane
53. Ashmead's Kernel
54. Fortune
55. Elstar
56. Newtown Pippin
57. Baldwin
58. Spigold
59. NY 428
60. NY 460
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