THE APPLE
Close to 8,000 varieties of apples grow in orchards around the globe. Of the six major global stone and tree fruits (excluding citrus)—peach, apricot, plum, cherry, pear and apple—apples are by far the most diffuse and prolific.
Yet, in this country, cooks pretty much limit their apple purchases to five types of apples: Gala, Red Delicious, Fuji, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith, in order of popularity.
Furthermore, we tend to cook apples only in sweet ways, as desserts such as apple pie, apple crisp or apple fritters, or we eat and drink them “sweetly,” as applesauce or apple cider.
A very unscientific survey of the indices in both my American- and foreign-published cookbooks shows that sweet preparations of apples outnumber savory ones by at least five to one.
Nonetheless, looked at historically, savory preparations using apples long pre-date—in truth, prefigure—sweet recipes. One of the oldest recipes in the Western canon, from Apicius (also known as “de re culinaria,” a collection of recipes dating to the 400s) is for a ragout of pork with “Matian apples”—the title of the recipe is “minutal matianum”—using a varietal name of the apple grower, Matian, a friend of Julius Caesar, as we might say “pork with Granny Smith apples” if we wished to invoke the hybridizer and namer of that apple, a “Mrs. Smith,” a grandmother, from New South Wales, Australia, who launched Granny Smiths out to the globe in 1868.
The ancient Romans and those living in Europe into the Middle Ages treated (furthermore, named) the apple as a “vegetable,” cooking it alongside various meats, especially pork and game, or serving cooked and oft-elaborately-spiced apples as its own course, alongside cooked root and green vegetables.
Apples were a favored stuffing for many meats, their native acidity serving as a foil to meats’ richness and fat. You will find such recipes up to modern times in all manner of cookbooks. In truth, one of the most common of savory pork preparations is “pork chops with apples,” a recipe with countless turns from countless kitchens, most of them North American.
Close to 8,000 varieties of apples grow all over the globe.
Apple Facts
- As a plant, apples are a member of the rose family.
- The crabapple is the only apple native to North America.
- Apple varieties range in size from a little larger than a cherry to as large as a grapefruit.
- The largest apple ever picked weighed three pounds.
- It takes the energy from 50 leaves to produce one apple.
- Apples are one-quarter air. That's why they bob.
- Some, but few, apple trees live to be 100 years old.
- Two-thirds of the fiber and many antioxidants are found in the peel of an apple.
- Apples are the second most valuable fruit grown in the United States. Oranges are first.
- Apples are grown in all 50 states, although because apple trees require cold each winter, warmer states such as Florida and Texas do not produce commercial crops.
- The globe's top apple producers are, in order, China, the United States, Poland, Italy and France.
- One of four apples harvested in the United States is exported.
- Only 5-6 percent of apples eaten in this country come from other countries such as New Zealand and Chile.
- Depending on the total volume of the harvest, between 40-60 percent of each year's U.S. apple crop is processed into apple juice and cider, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples and other apple-derived foods such as baby food or apple cider vinegar.
- Washington State is by far the largest producing state in the country. It grows over half of all U.S. apples.
- In 2020, the Gala apple took the top spot of favored apple variety from Red Delicious, with 46 million bushels produced (about 20% of the total U.S. crop).
- The top five apple varieties grown in the U.S. are, in order: Gala, Red Delicious, Fuji, Honeycrisp and Granny Smith.
- The most ascendant variety of apple in the U.S. is Cripps Pink (also known as Pink Lady).
The Mysterious Apple
Is there a more desirous, yet distant-seeming and mystery-laden, fruit than the apple?
Cut it along its “equator” and you’ll see a pentagram, a form used by ancient magicians to cast spells. (Cut it downward at its poles into equal halves and are there present two images of the female reproductive tract?)
We have the apple and Eve and The Garden of Eden; the apple and Snow White and her Witch. Merlin sat beneath an apple tree to teach. The gods of Valhalla are made immortal by eating only apples.
Mistletoe grows on apple trees. Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry sings—hauntingly, woozily—of “Avalon” (“the fields of apples”) that cured King Arthur of legend.
November First may be All Saints’ Day for Christians and Día de Muertos for Mexican folk, but it was the first day of the New Year for the ancient Celts. The preceding night was called “Samhain” (what later became “All Hallows Eve” or “Halloween”), on which night the Druids cut down mistletoe from the apple trees and sanctified the fruit that had borne it.