Around the world in rare and beautiful apples
May 9, 2021 6:38 PM Subscribe
Around the world in rare and beautiful apples: Atlas Obscura's Gastro Obscura showcases photos of unusual apples like the delicate and pretty Pink Pearl, the star-shaped Api Etoile, the deep red-black Black Oxford, the potato-like Knobbed Russet, and dark red-fleshed Otterson.
While he’s still selling prints, another book is in the works.
posted by zamboni at 7:24 PM on May 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
Sign up to be notified for the 2021 edition!Pretty much all the prints are also currently sold out. I do like that the proceeds of some prints, like the Pale Lady Gala, go to support GLITS.
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A new, longer photobook is in the works, featuring a larger selection of rare and curious apples photographed by William Mullan, designed by Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos.
posted by zamboni at 7:24 PM on May 9, 2021 [3 favorites]
Many of those apples look quite lovely and sound quite delicious! However, I have had a Pink Pearl or at least a Pink Pearl-adjacent apple and it was just awful. Bitter and mealy like a Granny Smith but with too much Granny and not enough Smith.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:23 PM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:23 PM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
I grew up in apple country. Give me a humble Golden Delicious any time.
The most exotic variety we ever grew was the Sheep’s Nose. They were good in cider.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:42 PM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
The most exotic variety we ever grew was the Sheep’s Nose. They were good in cider.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:42 PM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Pink Pearl is so lovely that I can see why it might have been chosen over tastier varieties—
which makes me really really want a Knobbed Russet ripe. Even though it would be a terrible hassle to scrub for keeping.
posted by clew at 9:12 PM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
which makes me really really want a Knobbed Russet ripe. Even though it would be a terrible hassle to scrub for keeping.
posted by clew at 9:12 PM on May 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
One of my favorite memories of the last Minnesota State Fair I attended was the 'here's all the new apples the ag department at the U is developing, try some samples' booth. first kiss, y'all, give it a shot if you can get it.
posted by dismas at 9:14 PM on May 9, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by dismas at 9:14 PM on May 9, 2021 [7 favorites]
For any Oregon readers, Queener Farm is offering a variety of apple CSAs, with 70+ different apple varieties, starting in late July (they'll even deliver to your home if you're in Portland, Eugene, or Salem). This is the first year I've signed up for it so I can't yet speak to it personally, but I've heard good things about it and am really excited to get to try so many different apple types.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:48 PM on May 9, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by DingoMutt at 9:48 PM on May 9, 2021 [5 favorites]
Timely. I'm selecting fruit trees for our backyard, with an eye to later cider making and fruit brandy distillation... and what wonderful images.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:27 PM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:27 PM on May 9, 2021 [2 favorites]
I wish so often my local grocery stores would carry more varieties of apples. They've gotten better, though - I never heard of Jazz or Ambrosia prior to a few years ago, Pink Lady or Kiku. All additions to the standard stock of Gala, Golden and Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji, Jonathan and McIntosh.
Makes me think of this poem:
The Crossed Apple
I’ve come to give you fruit from out my orchard,
Of wide report.
I have trees there that bear me many apples.
Of every sort:
Clear, streaked; red and russet; green and golden;
Sour and sweet.
This apple’s from a tree yet unbeholden,
Where two kinds meet, -
So that this side is red without a dapple,
And this side’s hue
Is clear and snowy. It’s a lovely apple.
It is for you.
Within are five black pips as big as peas,
As you will find,
Potent to breed you five great apple trees
Of varying kind:
To breed you wood for fire, leaves for shade,
Apples for sauce.
Oh, this is a good apple for a maid,
It is a cross,
Fine on the finer, so the flesh is tight,
And grained like silk.
Sweet Burning gave the red side, and the white
Is Meadow Milk.
Eat it, and you will taste more than the fruit:
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the darkness at the root,
The rain, the dew,
The earth we came to, and the time we flee,
The fire and the breast.
I claim the white part, maiden, that’s for me.
You take the rest.
Louise Bogan
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 12:22 AM on May 10, 2021 [17 favorites]
Makes me think of this poem:
The Crossed Apple
I’ve come to give you fruit from out my orchard,
Of wide report.
I have trees there that bear me many apples.
Of every sort:
Clear, streaked; red and russet; green and golden;
Sour and sweet.
This apple’s from a tree yet unbeholden,
Where two kinds meet, -
So that this side is red without a dapple,
And this side’s hue
Is clear and snowy. It’s a lovely apple.
It is for you.
Within are five black pips as big as peas,
As you will find,
Potent to breed you five great apple trees
Of varying kind:
To breed you wood for fire, leaves for shade,
Apples for sauce.
Oh, this is a good apple for a maid,
It is a cross,
Fine on the finer, so the flesh is tight,
And grained like silk.
Sweet Burning gave the red side, and the white
Is Meadow Milk.
Eat it, and you will taste more than the fruit:
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the darkness at the root,
The rain, the dew,
The earth we came to, and the time we flee,
The fire and the breast.
I claim the white part, maiden, that’s for me.
You take the rest.
Louise Bogan
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 12:22 AM on May 10, 2021 [17 favorites]
Dr Keith Lamb was born in 1919 and earned his doctorate on the back of the dozens of indigenous varieties of apple Malus domestica that he collected in the 1940s. He got on his bicycle and ranged all over Ireland from Dublin, following leads and his nose and bringing back cuttings which he propagated in the grounds of Albert College in Glasnevin, at that time the seat of UCD's Department of Agriculture which accorded Lamb a small corner for his heritage orchard. In those days, every county, indeed different sections of each county, had its own local apple varieties which the local people liked. One can exaggerate the micro-climatic and ecotypic advantages of a given variety being in the place where Dr Lamb found it. Nevertheless the variety of varieties was evidence of considerable cultural differentiation within the Republic. The very names enrich our experience of the natural and culinary world: "Honey Ball, Greasy Pippin, Lady’s Finger, Maiden’s Blush, and Widow’s Friend". In 1964, UCD acquired and started to develop their Belfield Campus in the South of the city, so they sold most of the Albert College estate to Dublin Corporation for housing - including the infamous Ballymun Flats that were knocked down a few years ago as unfit for human habitation. This is all fine - people must be housed. But nobody knew what to do with Dr Lamb's apple trees, so they were bull-dozed into a corner and burned. Very slow hand-clap, lads!
A generation later, Annie Appleseed - a USian called Anita Hayes - woke up to that fact that the gene pool of Irish apples was being squeezed through a very strait gate. The Hayes family used to live a very few miles from Chateau Bob. Anita started her life's work by pulling irreplacable genetic combinations & generations of developed disease resistance out of ruined farmsteads as people started buying Golden Delicious from France because they were so Golden, so Delicious, so cheap, so uniform and so boring [apols The Underpants Monster]. It beggars belief that people would drive into town and buy apples when they can nip over the wall and scrump them from their elderly farming neighbours. In 1996, Anita started Irish Seed Savers near Scarriff, Co Clare. But many of Dr Lamb's varieties, like the plays of Sophocles, are gone forever.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:53 AM on May 10, 2021 [14 favorites]
A generation later, Annie Appleseed - a USian called Anita Hayes - woke up to that fact that the gene pool of Irish apples was being squeezed through a very strait gate. The Hayes family used to live a very few miles from Chateau Bob. Anita started her life's work by pulling irreplacable genetic combinations & generations of developed disease resistance out of ruined farmsteads as people started buying Golden Delicious from France because they were so Golden, so Delicious, so cheap, so uniform and so boring [apols The Underpants Monster]. It beggars belief that people would drive into town and buy apples when they can nip over the wall and scrump them from their elderly farming neighbours. In 1996, Anita started Irish Seed Savers near Scarriff, Co Clare. But many of Dr Lamb's varieties, like the plays of Sophocles, are gone forever.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:53 AM on May 10, 2021 [14 favorites]
The Black Oxford looks like something you'd make into scumble.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:17 AM on May 10, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:17 AM on May 10, 2021 [5 favorites]
I'm selecting fruit trees for our backyard, with an eye to later cider making
Is this the sort of thing I'd need a cider press to understand?
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:57 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
Is this the sort of thing I'd need a cider press to understand?
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:57 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
sometimes I too feel "small, acidic and worthless" like the humble bean apple.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 4:27 AM on May 10, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by Dressed to Kill at 4:27 AM on May 10, 2021 [8 favorites]
This is excellent, thanks! I added 2 Arkansas Black apple trees plus a Cortland for pollination. These join the Liberty and Gala trees that have a few years head start in our little orchard. We bought some Arkansas Black apples years ago at a place in north Georgia and I've been chasing them ever since. Super crunchy and sweet, with that beautiful dark skin. They look very much like the Black Oxford on that page.
posted by jquinby at 5:47 AM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by jquinby at 5:47 AM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
The Arkansas Black is my favorite apple - I think. The co-op used to get a small shipment every year but they haven't had any in such a long time that I'm not sure if it's my favorite any more.
There's a yuppie grocery store about four miles away that gets some special varieties so pre-pandemic I used to bike up there to check out the apples. They had a couple of varieties that were red inside, but they weren't the Pink Pearls described in the article. They were very good, however.
Right now I'm eating a very large Wild Twist apple from the Cub, a very good apple, fine-grained but crisp, moderately sweet.
posted by Frowner at 7:03 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
There's a yuppie grocery store about four miles away that gets some special varieties so pre-pandemic I used to bike up there to check out the apples. They had a couple of varieties that were red inside, but they weren't the Pink Pearls described in the article. They were very good, however.
Right now I'm eating a very large Wild Twist apple from the Cub, a very good apple, fine-grained but crisp, moderately sweet.
posted by Frowner at 7:03 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
Apple trees are - like people - unique individuals. They pollinate sexually and mix their genes with other apples trees, so the seeds of the next generation may be not-very-much like their parents and are endlessly various - some nice to eat, some not (and traditionally made into cider). But when we find the ones we like to eat, we clone them through grafting - every McIntosh apple tree is a clone of a tree that first grew in Ontario in 1811.
I once tasted an apple from a clone of a tree first grown in England in 1610 - it was utterly unlike any other apple I've had: tiny - crab-apple sized - and dry, almost mealy, but very sweet with a complex flavour. I imagine it would have made an excellent 17th century dessert, perhaps with a fine cheese.
Sadly, as the article points out, what used to be an abundance of variety - sweet apples, sour apples, apples that mature in July, apples that don't ripen until November, apples that need to be eaten right away and apples that will last in a cellar almost to next May - has been reduced by the both the convenience of shipping and the demands of grocery stores. Stores only want a couple of varieties and we can import apples to Ontario from Washington state or California or further, so we don't need funny looking Russets that last in our basement through the winter.
/rant brought to you by a couple of summers selling heritage apples for an orchard, from the first ripening July apples through the November ones. The owners planted a huge variety to ensure that they had crop over months, not all at once - and would train us to teach the customers what the different varieties were best for. Paula Reds are nice, early-ripening eating apples; Wealthys make a good pie in September, before the Northern Spys ripen.
posted by jb at 7:30 AM on May 10, 2021 [10 favorites]
I once tasted an apple from a clone of a tree first grown in England in 1610 - it was utterly unlike any other apple I've had: tiny - crab-apple sized - and dry, almost mealy, but very sweet with a complex flavour. I imagine it would have made an excellent 17th century dessert, perhaps with a fine cheese.
Sadly, as the article points out, what used to be an abundance of variety - sweet apples, sour apples, apples that mature in July, apples that don't ripen until November, apples that need to be eaten right away and apples that will last in a cellar almost to next May - has been reduced by the both the convenience of shipping and the demands of grocery stores. Stores only want a couple of varieties and we can import apples to Ontario from Washington state or California or further, so we don't need funny looking Russets that last in our basement through the winter.
/rant brought to you by a couple of summers selling heritage apples for an orchard, from the first ripening July apples through the November ones. The owners planted a huge variety to ensure that they had crop over months, not all at once - and would train us to teach the customers what the different varieties were best for. Paula Reds are nice, early-ripening eating apples; Wealthys make a good pie in September, before the Northern Spys ripen.
posted by jb at 7:30 AM on May 10, 2021 [10 favorites]
Black Oxfords are straight up amazing. They grow around here, in Maine. Almost like a plum, it’s a dessert apple. I’d buy a skipload of them each year if I could.
Growing a Black Oxford tree is sadly quite difficult. They seem to be picky about soils, and often dormant, fruiting for the first time maybe a decade after a sapling goes into the ground. (Other growers might have much better luck, admittedly.)
posted by Jubal Kessler at 9:13 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
Growing a Black Oxford tree is sadly quite difficult. They seem to be picky about soils, and often dormant, fruiting for the first time maybe a decade after a sapling goes into the ground. (Other growers might have much better luck, admittedly.)
posted by Jubal Kessler at 9:13 AM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
I’m in Minnesota so naturally my tree is a Honeycrisp. I’d love to experiment with some bud grafting onto my old crabapple tree. It’d be really cool to have a few of these unique heirlooms on one tree.
posted by misterpatrick at 4:41 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by misterpatrick at 4:41 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
Apple beauty is only skin deep. The Pink Pearl looks good and has a catchy name, but it's not a great eating apple. This makes me wonder if some of the ugly ones might score high on the taste test.
posted by yinchiao at 6:59 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by yinchiao at 6:59 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you like a tart apple, I highly highly recommend the Dolgo, a date-sized sweet-tart edible crabapple. I made 7 or 8 GALLONS of glorious hot pink applesauce from ours last year.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:25 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:25 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]
My favourite apple is the Elstar, which was developed not so far from where I live. It's soursweet, crispy, never mealy, and rather aromatic. I buy the small ones and then have one with my muesli in the morning.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:34 PM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:34 PM on May 10, 2021 [2 favorites]
My mum has a Tom Putt in her garden - they've kind of spoilt me for supermarket apples. Despite what the linked article says, they don't taste sharp to me exactly, but they're notably not sweet. More kind of nutty. They're traditionally a cider apple, but they're good eating too.
I do still enjoy a good Braeburn though.
posted by BlueNorther at 5:57 AM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I do still enjoy a good Braeburn though.
posted by BlueNorther at 5:57 AM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Opals forever!. This is a designer apple, local to me, grown exclusively in southeastern Washington, and it is heaven. HEAVEN.
posted by HotToddy at 3:20 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by HotToddy at 3:20 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
I came here to second this young man's lovely instagram. It's more diverse than just apples now, but it has truly been one of the few joys of the last year.
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:45 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:45 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Time for posting Ontario’s finest ginger gold omnomnom like a piece of ginger made love to a Fuji version of a golden delicious
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:15 PM on May 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:15 PM on May 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
I do not know what the status is, but scion exchanges (e.g. https://crfg.org/2020-scion-exchanges/ ) from a local orchard/fruit enthusiasts group can be a great way to expand what’s on your fruit trees if you already have ones in your yard. You may find local or heirloom varieties that are commercially unavailable.
Apples graft relatively easily. So do most from the prunus family (plums, apricots, peaches, etc.)
Seeing them take and bear (you’ll still have to wait a few years for much yield in most cases) is a real thrill.
posted by allium cepa at 3:09 AM on May 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
Apples graft relatively easily. So do most from the prunus family (plums, apricots, peaches, etc.)
Seeing them take and bear (you’ll still have to wait a few years for much yield in most cases) is a real thrill.
posted by allium cepa at 3:09 AM on May 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
Jubal Kessler, do Black Oxfords not graft onto other stock?
posted by clew at 2:25 PM on May 12, 2021
posted by clew at 2:25 PM on May 12, 2021
One of my favorites is Dixon's champagne apples. It's a golden delicious variant, but crisper and more complex. They are really good keepers, so I can usually hoard some all winter in the fridge. They get sweeter and better as they get older, until the skins get just a little soft. They are NEVER mealy.
They were grown in New Mexico, near the Jemez, for many years. A flood washed out the groves, and the family moved to Wisconsin. Every year, they drive truckloads of pre-ordered apples down to New Mexico so people can get their annual champagne apple fix, around the same time as the state is roasting chile (apple pie with roasted green chile is not to be missed). I stood in line for almost two hours in the fall, masked and in full sun, to get my two boxes of champaigns.
The cider is great too....especially if you are willing to let it ferment a little.
posted by answergrape at 6:32 PM on May 21, 2021
They were grown in New Mexico, near the Jemez, for many years. A flood washed out the groves, and the family moved to Wisconsin. Every year, they drive truckloads of pre-ordered apples down to New Mexico so people can get their annual champagne apple fix, around the same time as the state is roasting chile (apple pie with roasted green chile is not to be missed). I stood in line for almost two hours in the fall, masked and in full sun, to get my two boxes of champaigns.
The cider is great too....especially if you are willing to let it ferment a little.
posted by answergrape at 6:32 PM on May 21, 2021
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posted by kinnakeet at 7:01 PM on May 9, 2021 [5 favorites]