The Produce Savant: apples

Showing posts with label apples. Show all posts

Saturday, January 14, 2017

A Midwestern Visitor to the Big Apple

Enough with the New York apple-centrism! Time to give the Midwest some love.

Recently I noticed Samascott Orchards selling a new apple at the Union Square Greenmarket. The apple was a rosy red beauty with a focus-grouped name, EverCrisp. A handwritten sign claimed a parentage of Fuji and Honeycrisp. Was this new apple destined for greatness? Despite my dubious record of produce prognistication, I had to investigate.

The EverCrisp is a strikingly attractive apple, but apples can't get by on looks alone. (The Red Delicious apple, for example, the prototypical childhood illustration of an apple, isn't spared ridicule because of its looks; one apple preservationist denounced "this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit" in an article celebrating the end of its "evil reign.") The name "EverCrisp" suggested a commitment to marketing that some apples haven't earned yet. Samascott, for example, sells plenty of apples with names like NY 428, NY 460, NY 543 and NY 652, but it's hard to cross over into the big time with a New York State Agricultural Experiment Station robo-name.

The "Crisp" in EverCrisp's name not only piggybacks off of Honeycrisp apple - an extremely popular and profitable apple variety - but also emphasizes the attribute that makes the Honeycrisp so popular: its texture. Crispness is king! The goal is to have cells that shatter, noisily and juicily. As a New Yorker article called Building a Better Apple noted,

Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple - even more desirable than taste, according to one study - crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouthfeel. Vibrations pass along the lower jaw and set the cochlea trembling. Biting into a really crisp apple, one feels, in the words of Edward Bunyard, the author of "The Anatomy of Dessert," "a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days."

Some additional research helped me understand the appeal of the "Ever" portion of the name. As one Midwestern seller touts, "Sweet and ultra-firm EverCrisp can sit on your counter for weeks without losing crispness!"

Hardiness is the foundation of EverCrisp, which was developed by a fairly unlikely breeder, the Midwest Apple Improvement Association, a collective of apple growers grappling with the unique climate challenges of their region, whose late frosts kill off apples. [Washington and New York, the "powerhouse apple states" have breeding programs that focus on late blooming apples that benefit from proximity to large bodies of water (the Pacific Ocean and Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes) that warm up slowly in the spring; ditto New Jersey, which similarly benefits from the Atlantic Ocean. The University of Minnesota's apple breeding program, creator of Honeycrisp and other successful apples like the Zestar! and SweeTango, was designed to address brutal winter weather. The Ohio State agricultural program that developed the Melrose apple no longer develops apples.] With no formal university program for landlocked Ohio/Indiana apple farmers, the growers dedicated themselves to breeding and promoting disease-resistant, late blooming apples that, in their own words, "naturally escape fire blight, scab, powdery mildew, cedar apple rust and late spring freezes thus reducing the use of fungicides, antibiotics, and orchard heating."

I appreciated the irony of this modest Midwesterner, bred to overcome the obstacle of not having New York's maritime apple advantage, being grown in New York. So far I've only seen EverCrisps at Samascott's stand, but if all goes well other farmers will follow, as will Whole Foods and other grocers.

EverCrisp is a very welcome addition to Samscott's arsenal, especially this winter, when some of my other favorites (Macoun, Ashmead's Kernel, Golden Russet) seem to be having a difficult or truncated season. The EverCrisp is as crisp and juicy as billed, with a good apple flavor (for those of us, however unusually, prize flavor over texture), reminiscent of Fuji but without Fuji's occasional powdery and metallic notes. Its attendance at the Samascott stand has been very iffy, showing up sporadically. Twice I've been told the EverCrisp season was over, then been pleasantly surprised by a repeat appearance.

Nevertheless, Samascott demonstrated its commitment to the EverCrisp by investing in a new, formal sign.

Can the EverCrisp "remain crisp for many months"? I'm not planning any testing at my house. That's not the fate of produce (not even longevity champs like red cabbage) in my clutches. But I am encouraged by the sentiment.

Equally encouraging: EverCrisp's modest price. For fans of the notoriously expensive Honeycrisp, and similarly expensive (albeit less popular) SweeTango, EverCrisp offers a similarly tasty, crunchy apple but without the price bite.

That's another Midwestern approach that is always welcome in the Big Apple.

Friday, December 2, 2016

What the heck is that? Apple pear

Apple pears: the first step in a project to breed interesting hybrids of popular fruit? A project that could include the easy-peel, not-too-acidic banana pineapple (not to be confused with banana potatoes ) and one-step-ratatouille tomato eggplant?

The truth is a bit less exciting.

Apple pears are a type of pear, as some of the fruit's other names, Asian pear (and its geographic subsets, Chinese pear, Korean pear, Taiwanese pear, Japanese pear, etc.) and nashi (Japanese for "pear") indicate. Apple pears have been enjoyed in Asia for thousands of years and in California since the Gold Rush days, when Chinese immigrant miners planted trees.

The "apple" part of "apple pear" refers to the fruit's appearance and texture - round and crisp like an apple. In other ways, the apple pear definitely tows the pear line. Apple pears ripen on the tree, not the kitchen counter. They are sweet, with a flavor in the pear family. Apple pears' skins can range from golden yellow to greenish yellow to paper bag brown, with a corresponding texture than can range from delicate to a bosc pear level of coarseness.

Here you can see the outward similarity of the two apple pears to the apple on the left. The apple pears' grainy texture, not quite revealed in the photo, differs from the apple's. Unlike a regular pear, the seed pod is dead center, rather than located in the lower portion of the fruit.

The more delicate apple pears sometimes earn dog in a winter vest protective gear.

th -- they're both members of the rose family, or pomes -- but the "apple pear," or Asian pear, blurs the line between the two fruits. Their flavor packs the unmistakeable honeyed sweetness of a pear, but Asian pears have the crisp texture, size and roundness of a superlative eating apple. To scientists they're unquestionably pears, but they're a distinctive and quirky branch of the family. You can use them in tarts, pies and other baked confections, but aficionados recommend eating them out of hand.

Distinctive Characteristics

Apple pears differ significantly from the familiar Eurasian varieties that fill your grocer's produce section. Ordinary pears don't ripen on the tree, but must be harvested while still hard and encouraged to ripen in storage. Asian pears, like apples, can be left on the tree and picked while ripe. Conventional pears have textures ranging from meltingly soft to grainy and sand-like, but always relatively dense. Apple pears have a distinctively crisp texture, apple-like but even lighter and juicier than most apples.

Pick a Good One

Asian pears are packaged carefully to minimize bruising, their major flaw from the retailer's perspective. Avoid fruit with visible bruising or other damage. Apple pears range from pale yellow to russet to green in color, but this is a question of cultivar rather than ripeness. Rather than color, use your nose to judge the ripest fruit. The best-tasting pears have the sweetest fragrance.

But they are surprisingly hardy in other important ways: they don't turn brown or mealy when exposed to air, making them a good choice for salads and cheese platters, and their shelf life is noticeably longer than that of either apples or regular pears.

My friend Thom sent me a picture from a Japanese supermarket in Hong Kong of this gift box of giant apple pears grown in a greenhouse in Japan.

The price (using the conversion of Hong Kong dollars to U.S. dollars at the time of the picture) is over $22 per apple pear. Yes, $22 each! A box of six makes a nice gift for the right person.

How can you do justice to a fruit this expensive? Chomping down wouldn't seem right. Perhaps you could only cut it thinly and curate on a platter with some equally fancy tidbit.

Fortunately, when I buy apple pears, whether at the Union Square Greenmarket, a fruit stand or in Chinatown, I don't have such constraints. At $1 each, and sometimes half that cost, apple pears are free to be simply enjoyed.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Insect Farm, Tokyo

I am always happy to get an email from my friend Hiroko and doubly happy when she brings news from Tokyo's swingin' produce scene.

Recently she wrote to me,

I went to a town in Tokyo called Ebisu in Tokyo last Sunday and stumbled upon a farmers market. It was pretty small, maybe too small to call a market, so they called it "Marche" (as if the serving size is always smaller in France than in the US).

She actually wrote more, but of course I was chock full of questions about this first paragraph, and I made Hiroko go back and explain.

What do you mean, “town in Tokyo”? Does Tokyo have towns? And how far away is Ebisu from your “town” in Tokyo?

Hiroko patiently explained,

Tokyo has 23 wards (called "ku," like Meguro-ku, Shibuya-ku) and cities (called "shi," like Tama-shi), and small towns in them. Ebisu is in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo - and is about 15 minutes train ride from where I live. Ebisu housed famous brewery, which produced Yebisu Beer (that is available in the U.S) . The fancy mall where this marche was held used be a beer factory with beautiful red brick architecture, but was kind of abandoned after the shut down of the factory. It kind of reminds me of the the South Street Seaport.

Back to her original comments:

Because it was in one of those fancy urban malls it seemed more for tourists than for locals to get fresh produce. But actually there were a couple of good stands - I got some organic herbs and peppers. One of the shops was called "Insect Farm."

I asked the lady there what's in the name, and she said "We are organic, so there are a lot of insects in our farm." I thought it was so cute I took some pictures.

I was surprised by the routine use of English, so I asked Hiroko, Would the use of English be routine in a tourist area?

Hiroko wrote,

Yes, pretty much. Train/subway stations, other main attractions of the city usually have Japanese/English signs, some even have signs in Chinese and Korean.

(Hmm, so why does Japan have a reputation as being challenging for (admittedly spoiled and self-entitled) English speakers? Oh, it's spoken English that is the problem, not written English. And Japanese students typically study English for at least 6 years, unlike the US, famous for its foreign language deficit.)

I asked Hiroko to translate the prices and compare them to the standard costs in Tokyo. She wrote,

The bunch of sage I'm holding was 150 yen, about $1.25. It's a reasonable price for organic herbs. [Hiroko, that's cheaper than NYC prices!]

The big bunch of French celery is 300 yen [around $2.50] and a bunch of borage is 150 yen [around $1.25] . A bag of assorted color bell peppers is 300 yen [around $2.50].

The apples in the photo cost 150 yen a piece and 500 yen for four. The muscat grapes are 1000 yen a bunch. It is a bit expensive compared to the regular market price, but they were organic.

I asked Hiroko if most of the market apples were the Japanese-origin apples that are now popular in the markets here - Fuji and Mutsu. She wrote,

We have quite a bit of varieties - Akibae, Shin Sekai, Shinano Gold and Kogyoku. My favorite is Fuji to eat and Kogyoku to cook. Kogyoku has tart flavor and crisp texture, and it won't get mushy when cooked.

Despite succumbing to the charms of Insect Farm, Hiroko concluded,

That small Marche made me missing Honeycrisp apples, hot apple cider, and other stuff at Union Sq. Green Market. And I miss Autumn in NYC.

We miss you too, Hiroko! Our fingers are crossed for a visit to NYC in 2016!

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

What the heck is that? Sooty blotch

My friend Robair recently commented, "Every time I read your blog, I learn something new about something I'd like to eat."

Not this time, baby.

I should be upfront with the news: Sooty Blotch is not actually an item of produce, though it's fun to imagine asking a vendor for 2 lbs. of it. Nor is "sooty blotch" a vivid insult, though it sounds like an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

Rather, sooty blotch is the first, and probably the last, non-produce entrant in the "What the heck is that?" category.

Sooty blotch is a fungus.

Sooty blotch isn't a tasty fungus like mushrooms or huitlacoche, the Mexican corn fungus that is also known, hilariously, as corn smut. Sooty blotch is the fungus that gives meaning to the term "no spray."

Sooty blotch is associated with wet summers, and can affect other fruit besides apples - pears, grapes and plums are also favorites of the fungus. Farmers can treat their crops with fungicides or simply prune the trees more aggressively during the winter, since better air circulation means better drying in the wet warm weather.

Seeing unsprayed apples is like seeing one of those "Shocking and Unrecognizable: Stars Without Make-up!" articles that celebrity magazines love to publish. Wow, is that a blemish on Beyonce? You mean it takes work for Katy Perry to look glamorous?

You mean apples would like this without anti-fungal spray?

Listen to Iowa State University's plant pathologists discuss sooty blotch and hear the echoes of feminist deconstructions of the conventions of beauty. As one pathologist noted mournfully, "People know what a good apple looks like. They're used to the Disney World-looking apples." Another pathologist added, "It's devastating if you're the grower," saddled with apples unfit for the consumer's gaze, suitable "only... for juice and in pies."

I notice that even organic apples sometimes feel the pressure to be beautiful, especially if they're jockeying for attention in a gourmet market.

Meanwhile the dreaded fungus is by all accounts tasteless and harmless. "Give the skin a good scrubbing if it bothers you," one vendor at the Union Square Greenmarket told me. "Or scrape it off with your nail. That is, if it bothers you." He was right - there was no taste difference, and some of the discoloration did come off on my cloth when I gave a few wipes.

Learning about sooty blotch has made me a bit more accepting of apples' cosmetic imperfections. At the same time, it has also made me aware of the hard work - and probable chemical intervention - that goes into making an apple look naturally perfect.

Today I bought a perfect-looking apple. But lovely on the outside did not guarantee perfection on the inside. Nature often surprises.

Hmmm...could this become a selling point?

Ya gotta have a gimmick!

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Apple picking in friends' backyard

Apples! The pride of the Union Square Greenmarket, where you can buy over 60 varieties (and counting).

But what the heck are they doing growing in my friends' backyard?

I surprised myself by acting like an urban hayseed. It's not like I don't grow produce myself. I covet the sour cherry tree on 19th Street near 2nd Avenue! And I fondly recall the crab apple trees that were common in my childhood home in Queens. But I betray my urban sensibilities when I encounter real apple trees in a backyard, full of fruit ripe for the picking.

My friends Joan and Frank have a house in Stony Brook, a college town on Long Island. They planted two apple trees in honor of their young grandsons, Tyler and Cameron.

Joan and Frank described the apple trees as McIntosh and Red Delicious, probably the two most popular varieties in New York. The McIntosh tree, bearing round red fruit, was indeed a McIntosh, but I had my doubts about the Red Delicious. "They're not ripe yet," Joan said of the still-green fruit. But they looked full-sized and ripe to me, despite its green color.

Feeling curious, I picked one of the green apples - you can do that with a tree in your backyard - examined it. The apple looked like it was as big as it was going to be; all of the apples on the tree did. I washed the mystery apple and cut it up. This was not a Red Delicious at all, but rather some variety of green, semi-tart apple.

I reviewed the inventory of greenish apples I had in my head. Too small and tart for Mutsu. Too sweet for Rhode Island Greening. Didn't really look nor taste like Granny Smith. What was this apple?

I took a couple of apples, thinking I would ask one of the Union Square apple farmers. I ended up eating them instead. That happens a lot with fruit and me.
So I described the green apples to some farmers, and we played the "Who Am I?" game. The most compelling guesses were two heirloom varieties I had never heard of: Briggs Auburn, a variety so obscure it doesn't even get a mention on the comprehensive fruit fetish site Orange Pippin, and Chehalis. Could this simple Red Delicious apple tree really be an obscure heirloom variety instead? Apple trees grown from seed can cross-pollinate to become a different variety than expected. Maybe that's what happened here.

I decided not to get too hung up on the green apple's mysterious identity, which left plenty of room to mull over the pleasure of having an apple tree in the first place. There were apples to eat and apples to squish and throw into the brook behind the house.

There were apples to observe as science experiments, as in this one, Bugs Like Apples.

And of course humans, ants and worms aren't the only animals to admire apple trees. Deer and rabbits love them too, as Joan noted ruefully. But there is enough to share, and enough to continue to engage Tyler and Cameron for years to come - hanging out in the shade of the trees, playing with the fruit, and sustained by its flavor and nutrition.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Pink-a-boo! I can see you! (Or, The Big Apple, Continued)

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.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

The Big Apple

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.