I was surprised and delighted
several days ago to spot one of my favorite heirloom apples occupying a spot
right near today’s budding “stars” – Honey
Crisp and Ambrosia (number 2 and
number 1 respectively on my own best of
the current list.) There in their own wooden box were two dozen Calville Blanc d’Hiver apples, a real old-timer
made familiar by Claude Monet’s 1870 still life Apples and Grapes. One of France’s most beloved dessert apples
dating back to the 1500s, it is making something of a comeback among New
England growers.
This trend does not surprise me since more and
more adventurous fruit lovers are discovering what I did 40 years ago; that some
of the most tantalizing apple “masterpieces” of all time have been found
hanging from the gnarled and neglected branches of old mostly-forgotten
survivors in someone’s back yard, abandoned orchard or beside a country lane. I have ever since shared a
love for George Washington’s Albemarle
Pippin, Tom Jefferson’s Esopus Spitzenberg,
or my own Dad’s Wolf River. I don’t
think I will ever again taste an apple pie better than one we made from a
combination of newly-picked Red
Astrachans and Newtown Pippins,
nor a more perfectly-balanced cider than what our handsome maple press turned
out with a blend of Macs and Jonathans with a few handfuls of crabs
thrown in for color and tannin.
There is a good reason why even in the early
days of the 20th century no home orchard would be without a Northern Spy, a Winesap or two and at least one “Russet” and a “Pearmain” of one
prefix or another. And by the way, that famous Monet painting we noted features
– along with the Calville Blanc – a
handful of very small yellow- green apples, each with a red patch, in the right
hand corner of the still life. These are apparently another French treasure,
the Api which is still with us today
at this time of year as the Lady, or
the Christmas Apple, available in
most markets and often tied into evergreen wreaths. Its popularity dates back
to Roman times.
The Calville
Blanc d’Hiver, with its iconic five prominent lobes reaches back 5
centuries to Normandy. A
superb cooking apple it produces a white fluffy sauce to which the author adds
just a pinch of maple sugar. Al Cooper Photo
Even the notation “Roman times” fails to hint at the true antiquity of this ubiquitous fruit we so take for granted today. Given that only wild crabs grew in the New World until the Pilgrims brought seeds from Europe -- where the domestication of apples had only begun to make its mark with the few artisans who had learned the skill of grafting, where did these thousands of varieties come from? Did they have a common birth? To make it all even more remarkable a story, plant scientists have now identified 57,000 plant genomes in the domestic apple, more than any other plant species yet studied. That outdistances by 36,000 what humans have! The answers to these questions and how they have come to us reads like a sequel to Shangri La.
The cradle in which all apples
entered this world and evolved millions of years ago lies in the forests of the
Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains of East Asia, where jagged 20,000-foot-high
peaks separate Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from western China. Here, where the
western foothills host a temperate sub-climate protected by surrounding forests
of spruce and hardwoods, nature provided the perfect “nursery” for walnuts,
apricots, apples and other developing plant species. Unlike the others however,
Malus domestica is able to survive
wherever its seeds are “planted” without human maintenance, carrying with it
the virtually unlimited genetic possibilities locked in its near-mystical
reproductive capacity. The long journey from that faraway “cradle” to today’s
market shelf was carried out by bears, horses and eventually the human traders
traveling west along the ancient “silk road”, doing no more than eating and
eliminating as they went.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment