Adam's Apples

"Is that a really tiny apple or a really big cherry?"—my daughter's reaction to Wickson, which is either a small apple or a large crab.  ¶  With its bright saturated red blush (over a yellow not unlike that of a Rainier cherry ), round, slightly elongated shape, and long stem, this small apple bears more than a passing resemblance to that fruit. Its skin is glossy and the small fruit is firm.  ¶  Wickson has coarse light-yellow flesh that is juicy and wonderfully crisp. It is well-balanced, tartness predominating but tempered by sugar, and with distinct malt-sugar notes. This is not a flavor I have encountered in any other apple and I wonder what kind of cider these would produce. In any case they make an excellent snack, full of snap and spice —but each is just a few bites. I found myself gnawing every eatable scrap of these little gems. Trees of Antiquity says ...

Ida fire-engine Red is decorated with light yellow-green lenticels of varying size. The arresting blush covers the entire fruit, through it grows streaky around the base and my sample has russet in the stem well. Ida is a large medium fruit, globular with just a little ribbing. Unbroken she is firm in my hand.

J.R.R. Tolkien's elves divided the year into six seasons, not four. Between autumn and winter came fading, an ebb in the tide of nature. Halfway between the cross-quarter day of Samhain (Halloween) and Yule, the trees at Nagog Hill Orchard stand bleak and bare under a gray November sky, so very different than that of early fall. These two trees: are the same as these:

Slow Food USA identifies 129 heirloom apple varieties for its Ark of Taste, from American Beauty (reviewed here ) to Yeats. This is an interesting catalog, including may photos, and I should like to taste every one of them. Unfortunately, there are detailed descriptions of only a few of the selected varieties (seven at this writing), and no simple way to find them! Until now, that is. Links below: Capitol Reef Granite Beauty Harrison Cider Hauer Pippin Newtown Pippin Gravenstein Sierra Beauty To make matters more confusing, not all of these seven are on the list of 129. Slow Food USA, like its international counterpart, promotes local food, biodiversity, and appreciation of good things to eat.

If your idea of a russet apple is small and round, meet Hudson's Golden Gem. These conical apples are medium to medium-large and obviously ribbed. The russetting, like that of other varieties, is a treat to look at: rusty, toasty brown and not entirely opaque, creating subtly shifting colors wonderfully variegated.

On the small side of medium, this cheerful yellow variety recalls both Red and Golden Delicious. Coville has the exaggerated ribbed and tapered profile of the former and the color and dark lenticels of the latter, from which it surely must be descended. Some have a small slight blush, rosy orange. At the base a circle of bumps surrounds an open calyx. These bruise easily and have a lush sweet aroma.

A fellow apple fanatic emailed me recently about a rot- and pest-resistant apple that will stay crisp and fresh for two weeks at room temperature. Breeding will out, and the new variety has great genes, according to its patent. Horticulturalists tout the fruit's green potential to save growers money while avoiding the need for pesticides and energy-intensive storage. But (and excuse me for asking this)  how does it taste?

A pair of apple seeds from a Cox's Orange Pippin, November 2009.

Today's pick is a pretty apple, medium-sized, lobed, and conical, with a blush that is deep red where saturated and studded with tiny light lenticels. It has no aroma that I can smell. Fortune is part of the McIntosh family, and looks it, so I was surprised that its flesh is a light yellow, on the coarse side. (One sample's flesh had a green tint.) It is nicely crisp and juicy but with a little tenderness, and its peel is quite chewy: I imagine this variety travels well.

A vigilant reader provides a link to this BBC photo essay of apples in Kazakhstan, where the fruit originated and still grows wild. Thanks, ascorbic! A friend who has been there tells me of fabulous, huge Kazakh apples--not the ur-apples in ascorbic's link, but maybe shown here , and mentioned in this companion news story .

Matt Gunderson, writing in last week's Boston Globe, describes an experiment in high-density apple farming at Shelburne Farm and ten other orchards in Massachusetts. According to the UMass Extension Program , this technique entails using dwarf rootstock and training, rather than pruning, to direct tree vigor into the production of fruit rather than wood. Trees are small and close together, and very high yielding; furthermore they produce earlier, and yield larger fruit. Gunderson describes, for example, a 1.5-pound honey crisp specimen - the size of a small pumpkin - from the new orchard. Acromegalic Honeycrisps? I admit to mixed feelings about that. But I am glad to see apple journalism in my newspaper, and this seems to be the season: the Globe also published a recipe for apple cider sorbet. Yum!

This antique variety (more than 200 years old) is beloved, even legendary. It has a wonderful name, at once old (think Nodhead or Hubbardston Nonesuch) and new ( Honeycrisp, Jazz ). I have never tasted one before, so you can imagine my keen interest. I am holding a large, classically shaped apple with a red blush, both saturated and streaky, over yellow green, a little on the dull side. Light lenticels, mostly at the bottom, decorate the blush; they are barely visible elsewhere. There's some ribbing and, on my sample, flyspeck. Its calyx is closed, but not tightly, and it sits firm in my hand, with a faint cidery aroma.

From October's explosive bounty, the transition to November is stark. One week there might be nearly a score of choices at the market. Next week the harvest is in, the apples are picked, and the market is closed until June.* There are still late season choices, at orchards, in supermarkets, and at the farmers markets (mostly in cities) that remain open. Not everything has been picked, and much of what has been picked keeps well. Early November is also a chance for a last bite at varieties that don't do well in storage, at least not the storage that you or I can provide . Sometime this month the quality of the Macouns in supermarkets, industrially stored, will surpass that of those available from the farmers who grew them.