In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley
APPLES
Each of us has at least one “fairy tree” in our life, whether or not we remember. Mine was the apple tree in my childhood backyard; its U-shaped trunk was a wild place for me to hide with Daisy, our gangly yellow Lab. When the blossoms burst open we’d lounge in their fragrance, waiting for spirits to dust the flowers into ruby fruit. Later, I’d climb the branches to fill a pillowcase and Daisy licked the apples’ sticky juice from my hands.
Such a tree greeted me thirty-five years later at the western-Wisconsin farm campus, the Land School, of our sons’ Minneapolis Montessori school. Predating World War I, this tree reveals the place’s history with a simplicity that would elude even the most gifted storyteller. The sturdy, gnarled survivor was the first thing I saw when I came up the hard-packed dirt drive, its low branches open and welcoming, a ready embrace. It blossoms splendidly and produces lady apples, with yellowish skins, pretty red cheeks, and a faint scent of strawberries and rose. It’s the variety of apple tree that grows especially well in this region, needing the long cold winter to go dormant and enough snow to both protect it from overly harsh temperatures and, when the weather warms, melt to provide the tree with moisture. At harvest time, our young sons joyfully wriggled up into the branches for this distinctly sweet-tart, ping pong ball-sized fruit, then dropped with a soft thud and chased each other across the fields.
Picking apples is a quiet and absorbing task. You’re centered on a thin limb, stretching on tiptoe into the leaves, seeking balance. It seems the most prized apples are always the hardest to grasp. Cradled amidst the scents of ripe and rotting apples, you gain perspective on the earth’s daily spin from a sweet, safe perch. A good apple tastes of September sun, the warm, waning light; of its lineage; of the weather, the soil, and the way it was tended.
All this is to say that a good apple is the taste of balance—a range of natural acids and sugars, with notes so complex and different that they come on in waves of flavor with each bite. When cooked, a good apple may lose some of its subtlety—that hint of raspberries or rose or pepper or sage—while the essential character, the sharp and the sweet, becomes more intense. The variety of fruit and how and where it was grown informs the apple, just as the experiences of the eater have everything to do with how its taste is received. I doubt that I’d love apples so much if I’d never climbed into those trees as a child.
The old apple tree at the Land School is a regal reminder of the variety and diversity of the Upper Midwest’s small, independent orchards and fertile backyards. Up until the 1960s our region grew over fifteen thousand apple varieties, but today only about three thousand remain accessible to orchard keepers, gardeners, chefs, and home cooks.
Since the 1960s we’ve lost an estimated four out of five apple varieties unique to North America, many of which once grew in the Great Lakes region. Forty-five percent of the independently-owned nurseries that carried heirloom apple trees have gone out of business, unable to compete with the garden-and-lawn departments of big-box stores. Along with the orchards and trees went the supply of unique apples, replaced by cheaper and more readily available fruit from the large orchards on the West Coast. Gone, too, are many of the orchardists and their knowledge of trees and traditional practices, such as grafting cuttings of apple branches onto rootstock. Add to this climate change, which has reduced the number of winter chill hours critical to the health of our cold-hardy trees.
Yet despite all this, the future for apples is seeded with hope. Over the past twenty years, several organizations have pioneered efforts to preserve heritage trees as well as their related wisdom and lore, efforts inspired by the burgeoning interest in local foods. Gary Paul Nabhan—a founder of Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), internationally celebrated nature writer, and food and farming activist—is a creative force bringing the “all-American apple” back to our plates. In 2010, RAFT hosted a conference spearheaded by the country’s fifteen leading apple authorities. The result, Forgotten Fruits Manual and Manifesto, provides a national strategy for saving and restoring heirloom apples. A status report on apple conservation and loss, it makes the case for returning heritage apples to home tables as food and cider. It’s having an impact.
Sales of heirloom apples have increased significantly over the past ten years, driven mainly by the remarkable revival of the cider industry. Cider production rose over 200 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to the Beer Institute. Some financial support for these efforts comes from Slow Food, with two hundred thousand members in the US, and the Ceres Trust. Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, whose mission is saving and sharing heirloom seeds, is a leader in this effort.
Seed Savers Exchange’s orchard manager and pomologist (apple expert), Dan Bussey, is on a mission to restore vanishing varieties by identifying their unique role in our culinary and ecological conversation. This “James Audubon of apples” is a vigorous man with piercing blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and weathered, muscled arms that resemble the limbs of the trees he dearly loves. Over the past five years, he’s been cataloging over seventeen thousand different varieties for a seven-volume series, nearly three thousand pages titled The Illustrated History of Apples in North America. It describes the varieties known to have grown between the years 1623 and 2000.
Raised in the 1950s in rural Edgerton, Wisconsin, Bussey remembers his family’s trees and their generous branches where he hid after school to daydream and avoid homework. A prodigious apple picker, he made award-winning pies with his mother; he continues to do so today, using her recipe for a flaky crust. “I’ve learned which varieties really lend themselves to a good pie,” he told me. “You want some that stay firm and keep their slicing, and others that sauce down around it so you’ve got this wonderful filling of apple sauce with apple slices.”
When Bussey purchased his family’s land, he began restoring the orchard even before remodeling the old house. “By then, the orchard had been left to disrepair and I was set on reclaiming it,” he said. “I remembered my grandfather’s stories of his favorite apple, the T. E. Pippin, and was determined to find it. So I put an ad in the local paper offering a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone willing to share seedlings or cuttings. The guy who replied said, on the phone, ‘I don’t want your money, I’m just happy to meet someone interested in these apples.’” As we strolled Seed Savers Exchange’s heritage apple orchard, Bussey told me, “That first early effort made me realize how deeply connected to this romantic fruit we all are. I’ve been connecting with apple lovers ever since.”
At Seed Savers Exchange, Bussey is charged with reclaiming the older varieties, by sleuthing leads in newspapers and on websites, and foraging through abandoned farms. “The network of apple enthusiasts devoted to this fruit is amazingly wide and passionate,” Bussey said. “I’ve been to big orchards, where the owner will put the most popular varieties out for sale—Honeycrisp, for example—but when that knowledgeable, long-time regular customer shows up, he’ll reach under the table and pull up his special heritage apples.”
All things apple seem to find Bussey, as well. “When I first began pressing cider on my own farm, people brought me apples from their backyards and shared their childhood memories; everyone seems to have a story. I believe these things come to me for a reason. It’s my destiny.”
The rolling Historic Orchard is a Grand Central Station of trees—the tall and straight rub shoulders with the gnarled, skinny, and squat—with over eleven hundred different varieties forming one of the largest collections in the country. “I love the names of some of the older apples,” Bussey said, pointing them out. “Sheepnose, Chenango Strawberry, Cow’s Snout. It’s part of what makes them so interesting and worth seeking out.” Their names only begin to suggest the wild variety of their flavors and strengths. “Every apple has a purpose,” Bussey continued. “Most of the older varieties were bred for baking, sauce, and cider. Storage was the major concern.” Many of the very old, wilder varieties have thick skins and a strong acid content to repel harmful critters, so make for poor eating out of hand.
Bussey reached into a big tree’s full, wide canopy, so heavy with fruit its branches were weighed low to the ground. “Geneva Crab,” he said, plucking off a perfectly round, bright-red apple and cupping it in his outreached palm. “This