Apple Appellations:
While there are hundreds of apple varieties from which to choose, the best can be found close to home
By Domenica Marchetti

Cooking Light
October 2004

We are so accustomed to having apples available year-round at the supermarket, it’s easy to forget that one of America’s favorite fruits has a season.

Luckily, all it takes is a trip to a local farmers’ market or country orchard in the fall to remind us that the best apples are those that are selected, and eaten, not far from the tree. Alongside commercially popular varieties—such as Gala and Red and Golden Delicious, which many farmers’ markets and orchards carry—other apples beckon. Some are oblong, some mottled. A few have russet, potato-like skin and dense, tart flesh, and many have odd or intriguing names. Among them are newfangled cultivars like Ginger Gold and Honeycrisp, whose names tout the fruits’ virtues, and crossbreeds, such as Jonamac (a blend of Jonathan and McIntosh) and Macoun (a cross between McIntosh and Jersey Black). There are decades-or centuries-old antique varieties like Arkansas Black, Rhode Island Greening, and Westfield Seek No Further, whose names speak to their origins.

“People are getting more sophisticated in their apple-eating habits,” says Creighton Lee Calhoun, a retired Army lieutenant colonel from North Carolina who has spent the last two decades identifying and collecting old Southern varieties. “They don’t want apples that just sit in a bowl looking pretty. They want apples with flavor.”

Regional Taste

The selection of apples at your local market probably depends on where you live. All apples, commercial or boutique, express different qualities based on where they are grown. A Jonathan from the Midwest, for example, is likely to be tarter than one grown in the Northwest.

In California and the West, you might find Gravenstein, a juicy apple that breaks down perfectly for sauce. In Michigan and elsewhere in the Midwest, now is the time for Jonathan, considered the classic Midwestern cooking apple. In upstate New York and New England, you might come across Newtown Pippin, a tart, juicy green apple that originated on Long Island in the 1700s and was prized for making cider. In Virginia it is known as the Albemarle Pippin and was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, who grew it in his gardens, in Albemarle County. Another Southern favorite is Grimes Golden, an old West Virginia variety with cardamom-scented flesh and a fleeting season.

What all of these apples might lack in supermarket qualities—high gloss, uniformity, and transportability—they more than make up in flavor and in their performance in the kitchen.

Freshness Counts

Even the popular commercial varieties—Galas, Fujis, Braeburns, and Red and Golden Delicious—are often superior when they are picked fresh from an orchard tree. A Red Delicious from a farmers’ market may be smaller and duller-looking than its supermarket sibling, but it’s almost certain to taste better than the big shiny one that has been sitting in storage for six months or longer.

“Apples are the most diverse fruit,” says Julia Daly, spokesperson for the U.S. Apple Association. Some varieties, like the popular Gala, are so hospitable that they can be cultivated from California to Virginia. But you can also go to Pennsylvania or Minnesota or anywhere in New England and find local and regional varieties that haven’t made it on the national scene because they don’t travel or store well, the yield of the tree is low, or their appearance is less than perfect. “You might have an ugly piece of fruit that tastes delicious,” Daly says.

Apple Variables

Much like wine grapes, apples are greatly influenced by their surroundings—the climate, soil, and landscape—the variables people in the wine industry call terroir. Many apples need a long, cool fall to ripen properly on the tree, while others are best picked early in the season and eaten right away. Still others are best left to mellow and sweeten in cold storage.

Add to the mix the nature of the apple itself. Like humans, apples possess an infinite capacity for diversity. Just as children can grow into people very different from their parents, every seed of every apple has the potential to become a new variety. If you plant a seed from a Granny Smith in your backyard, the apple that emerges will not be a Granny Smith but something different. That is why individual apple varieties must be propagated not by seed but by grafting wood from the parent tree onto rootstock. In fact, most apples grown from seed turn out to be “spitters,” as apple historian Tom Burford puts it; they’re too tart or too bitter, and usually not worth propagating. For every so-called chance seedling that produces a high-quality apple, there are thousands of spitters.

That said, Burford adds, some of the most prized and popular apple varieties began as so-called chance seedlings, including Red Delicious, which was discovered by an Iowa farmer in the 1870s, and Granny Smith, discovered in Australia in 1868 by “Granny” Anne Smith of New South Wales.

Other cultivars, old and new alike, are the products of apple breeding programs. Fuji, a cross between Red Delicious and Ralls Janet, was developed in Japan in the 1930s. It has become so popular since its introduction here in the 1980s that it has displaced Granny Smith as the nation’s third most popular apple, behind Red and Golden Delicious.

World Favorite

The apple’s origins stretch back thousands of years to what is now Kazakhstan, in central Asia. Through trade routes, it made its way to Europe and eventually crossed the Atlantic in the 1600s with the first immigrants. By the mid-1800s, there were hundreds of varieties of apples across the United States, thanks in large part to the work of John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, who planted orchards (from seed, resulting in lots of spitters that were pressed for cider or fed to livestock) in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Settlers in the Northwest Territories were required to plant at least 50 apple or pear trees to obtain a land deed, and Chapman made sure he was there to get them started.

“His influence is still being felt today,” Daly says. “He is one of the reasons why there is such a variety of apples in this country, and why the U.S. apple industry is one of the leaders in the world.”

In Johnny Appleseed’s time, however, the most prized apples were not big, shiny ones but rather dense, sweet0tart fruits, such as Ashmead’s Kernel and Roxbury Russet. With their dull brown skin, such apples weren’t much to look at, but they were ideal for making hard cider, a staple in those days.

“Cider orchards were great production laboratories for great American varieties,” Burford says. Even the smallest farms had a few apple trees, and county encouraged new varieties through contests. “The 1800s were the pinnacle of the apple in America.”

Prohibition put an end to the cider orchards. Refrigerated rail cars and, later, controlled-climate storage techniques further changed the fate of the apple in the United States. Far-flung commercial orchards became economically viable, and growers limited their crops to varieties that were beautiful, resistant to bruising, and able to be kept in storage for months—even if it meant sacrificing flavor.

New, Old, and Delicious

At some point, the tide began to turn. Burford traces it to the introduction of Granny Smith to the United States around the 1960s. Here was an apple that was the opposite of Red Delicious—tart, crunchy, and most notably, not red. In recent years, high-quality “gourmet” varieties have added to the growing list of apple choices. There’s the Honeycrisp, a University of Minnesota cultivar with gorgeously striped red-pink skin and flashes of bright green, and there’s the Suncrisp, a blush yellow cross between Golden Delicious and Cox’s Orange Pippin (an old English favorite) that emerged from Rutgers University’s breeding program.

In fact, Daly says, in 2002, for the first time since the U.S. Apple Association began keeping track, Red Delicious apples accounted for less than half of the country’s commercial apple crop.

Even as new cultivars are flourishing, some antique varieties have begun to re-emerge as well, thanks to the proliferation of farmers’ markets across the country and because of Americans’ growing demand for top-quality heirloom produce. Renewed interest in antique apples is also due to dedicated apple enthusiasts who are working to promote such bygone favorites as Esopus Spitzenburg (another New York apple that was favored by Jefferson) and King David, a spicy apple with coarse flesh that is well0suited for pies and sauce.

In North Carolina, Calhoun has collected some 450 varieties of old Southern apples, creating grafts of the trees and planting them in his orchard. A few years ago, he donated grafts from the trees to the state of North Carolina, which has stabled the nine-acre Southern Heritage Apple Orchard north of Winston-Salem.

Trees of Antiquity, an organic fruit tree nursery in Sonoma County, California, sells 300 varieties of mostly heirloom apple trees at the farm and by mail order, and the business is growing by 20 percent every year, says co-owner Neil Collins. At Rural Ridge Farm, in Albemarle County, Virginia, Charlotte Shelton and her family grow an dsell 200 varieties of apples, most of them antique.

And in northern Michigan, Mike Berst, a self-described “apple lover pecking away at his keyboard,” promotes apple growers in Michigan and across the country through his Web site, www.applejournal.com. The site includes an extensive list of old and new apple varieties, with colorful descriptions of their appearance, flavor, and how they are best used in the kitchen. Among the many varieties he touts are Golden Russet (“the essence of a European gourmet apple—rich, dense, fine grained, full flavored, and crunchy”) and Gravenstein (“a variety that you want to find when it is in season, as the subtle and distinctive flavor does not stay at its peak for long”).

Whatever your preference, Berst says, the most important rule to remember about apples is to “buy them locally and in season. The way to get the best apple is to get it at the right time.”

RECIPE

Apple-Cranberry Cobbler

Toss at least two kinds of apples into this juicy cobbler for heightened flavor. Recommended choices include Cortland, Crispin, Golden Delicious, Goldrush, Gravenstein, Ida Red, Jonagold, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening, Stayman, and Winesap.

Crust:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons cornmeal

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into small pieces

1/4 cup ice water

1 teaspoon cider vinegar

Filling:

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 cup dried cranberries

10 cups thinly sliced peeled sweet-tart apples (about 6 large)

Cooking spray

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

To prepare crust, lightly spoon 1 1/2 cups flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Place 1 1/2 cups flour, cornmeal, and salt in a food processor; pulse 2 to 3 times or until combined. Add butter, and pulse 10 times or until mixture resembles coarse meal. With processor on, slowly add the ice water and vinegar through food chute, processing just until mixture is combined (do not form a ball). Press gently into a 4-inch circle on plastic wrap, cover and chill 15 minutes or until plastic can be easily removed.

To prepare filling, combine sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, and cinnamon in a large bowl. Add cranberries and apples; toss well to coat. Spoon apple mixture into an 11 x 7-inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.

Unwrap dough; place chilled dough on a lightly floured surface. Roll dough into a 12 x 8-inch rectangle. Fit dough over the filling. Fold edges under; flute. Cut several slits in top of dough to allow steam to escape. Bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes or until crust is golden brown. Cool on a wire rack 10 minutes before serving.