Let us all praise the Apple

Pears, too. But why are all the pears in the shops from Italy when it's such a quintessential English fruit?

I prefer the sharper varieties to the sweeter ones you favour

Fixed yr post.

But it was a come down from nectarine season in December-January, truth be told!

I am resolving to throw more apple cores out of the windows of trains and things. Today, going between Loughborough Junction and the Elephant, I passed a lovely apple tree in the middle of nowhere, which was overloaded with gorgeous looking bright red apples. No other way it could have got there, as it was quite hemmed in.

Yes, hedgerow apple trees are a must.

Kate you need to throw out multiple cores at the same spot as apple trees cannot self pollinate and you need two trees of distinct genetic stock (two cores will do it) for them to produce apples.

I learned that in the Guardian, this past weekend!

I like "Honey Crisp" although I think it may be some freakish new variety. It's hard to find in the US - maybe impossible in the UK.

Believed to be an offspring of Macoun and Honey Gold, Honey Crisp was introduced in 1991 by University of Minnesota breeders at Excelsior, MN. Both its parents were noted for having excellent flavor, moderate sized fruit, and "ok" texture. Honey Crisp's flavor is perhaps not as dramatic as Macoun at its peak, but is first rate. The Kicker in Honey Crisp is its crisp texture -- no other apple matches its crispness.

http://www.cambrookefoods.com/recipeImages/Recipe_73_1580349.jpg

We never get Macintosh apples here, so I got a few last week in Atlanta and they're SO GOOD.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/03/reviews/010603.03bilgert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

On a spring afternoon in 1806, a two-hulled canoe drifts down the Ohio River. In one hull sits a man, in the other a pile of appleseeds, each balancing the other's weight, each an equal partner in the reinvention of the American landscape. The man's name is John Chapman, a k a Johnny Appleseed, but to Pollan he is anything but the folksy puritan of Disney's devising. He is a man of "unreconstructed strangeness," who kept a pet wolf and once punished his foot for crushing a worm. He espouses Swedenborgian theology, falls in love with a 10-year-old girl and floats a hundred miles down the Allegheny on a block of ice. And he isn't all that interested in eating apples.

"The fact, simply, is this," Pollan writes. "Apples don't 'come true' from seeds -- that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent." A tree grown from Red Delicious seed may bear fruit that's emerald or umber, golf-ball-size or big as a grapefruit, cloyingly sweet or "sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge," as Thoreau put it -- anything, that is, except Red and Delicious. "Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples," Pollan adds, "but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider -- and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank." Johnny Appleseed was so beloved, in other words, because he "was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier."

Pollan calls Chapman the American Dionysus, a title that seems to sit more awkwardly on his pious, scraggly head than his saucepan hat.

Fuck yeah! Apples!

Just had some Wolf River apples in NE Washington State straight off the tree. Incredible! Each one is like a meal.

(Yes I am being a ninja of the obvious.)

xpost I haven't yet had a spectacular one, but we're definitely in the time when it's impossible to get one that's less-than-good.

SpeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!

whoa at video (never heard of that!)

Trust me, you need to see this movie. Immediately.

The Apple: future-disco-biblical-glitter musical C/D?

Anyway, back to apples themselves, since I have a good crisp one here I was just about to eat. Got a slew in my last CSA basket.

second week of honeycrisps at the farmer's market
delicious

the cox are sweet tonight

but seriously, i feel very lucky to live in the land of great apples