Reinette

Reine is French for "Queen."

So a literal translation of Reine de Reinettes (an excellent apple) must be something like, Queen of the, um, what, exactly?

Reine de Reinettes

Little queens? Princesses? Frogs?

Reinette forms the names of many apple: Ananas Reinette, Orleans Reinette, Reinette Simirenko, as well as Reine de Reinette (above). Its English equivalent is "rennet": not the stuff that curdles milk, but a less-common second meaning.

According to one longstanding theory, reinette derives not from the French word for "queen" but rather from the Latin "renatus," that is "rebirth." A "reborn" apple is a grafted one, that is, a cultivar. Many pomologists seem to accept this meaning.

Ananas Reinette: ribbit ribbit

The etymologists, however, are not on board. Skeat called renatus a "mistaken notion" and traced the word instead to rainette, an Old French word for "little frog," "because the apple is speckled like the skin of a frog."

Also contra cultivar: Reinette sometimes translates as "pippin." Reine de Reinettes (Queen of the Reinettes) is known in Great Britain as "King of the Pippins."

"Pippin" (an apple grown from seed) is, more or less, the opposite of "cultivar."

In 1792, a German naturalist named Diel used the term Reinette ("Reinetten") to name of one of seven classes of apples that together comprise and describe the entire fruit. (The others were ribbed apples, rose apples, rambours, pointlings, and flat apples.)

There is a translated account of Diel's system in Budd and Hanson's American Horticultural Manual (1908).

Spencer Beach, in Apples of New York, rejects Diel, and in any case Deil makes no etymological claims. Nonetheless Deil is widely cited in 19th-Century apple manuals and may have influenced how the Reinette sobriquet was subsequently applied.

I personally like this qualitative use of Reinette. Diel characterizes Reinettes as having "fine-grained, delicate" flesh, handsome shapes, and "rich, high, spicy, sugary" flavors. That seems broadly accurate.

However, in terms of word origins it looks like the frog has it by default.