Adam's Apples

At the start of this month I called March the bleakest in the apple year, so far from the harvest and all the keepers gone. But events proved me wrong. Lady Alice,  available here for the first time, is  only  sold in March. Blushing Golden Macoun persisted in the supermarkets. Piñata returned. My last Blushing Golden, belatedly discovered and awakened from its suspended animation in my refrigerator, proved sound and sweet. Every year is different and every day brings something new.

To my surprise and pleasure, there's a new variety to try. In March. I am holding a medium-sized apple with an orange-red blush over yellow that is tinted with a little green. There are darker red streaks in the wash of the blush, and tiny dark lenticels that are widely spaced. The fruit is well-formed, slightly ribbed, and firm. There's a little russet in the stem well and the calyx is loosely closed. Her faint sweet aroma suggests both apples and pears.

In September Macoun is an outright marvel, crisp and satisfying, bursting with juice and flavor that are vinous and complex. It is pretty wonderful in mid-winter too, when the last are trundled out from their refrigerated controlled-atmosphere vaults. Too fragile to cut it as a year-round industrial apple , Macoun is nonetheless popular enough to sell well past the season's end. To my very great pleasure. Most years I bid bid a wistful goodby to Macoun in the first half of February, but this year a local Whole Foods has sold these, incredibly, into March. (Credit where credit is due: it can only encourage them.)

You may notice a few familiar faces in the Apple Gallery of the New England Apple Growers Association this spring. The growers are borrowing a few of my apple photos to fill in until the next season, when the association will shoot its own. Unfortunately for everyone the varieties they needed include some of my earliest, and least worthy, efforts. I am nonetheless pleased (and flattered) to fill in. (Maybe I'll reshoot some of these myself this summer.) ● This is somehow my 200th apple post since I started this project in July of 2008. Things have slowed down a bit since that first season (when I wrote 87 posts in the first six months), but I'm still learning, still hungry, and still have something to say. Thanks for reading!

They make a distinct family of apples, yet all russets are not the same. The Golden and Roxbury varieties are so alike that some growers and sellers mislabel them (to my confusion ). So, let's set the record straight. On our left sits Roxbury Russet, an oblate, slightly ribbed medium-sized apple. Sometimes know as the Roz, this is one of America's oldest cultivated varieties.

Last week the Evil Fruit Lord, proprietor of the Fruit Blog, woke from his hiatus and posted a link to an entertaining news story about up-and-coming, waiting-in-the-wings apple varieties. Welcome back, lord of evil fruit, and did you see your shadow? Buried in the article was this tidbit: By 2005, the province of Nova Scotia was offering subsidies to anyone who ripped out their McIntosh fields and replaced them with Honeycrisps. So, fruit-on-fruit violence? Honeycrisp moving in on McIntosh turf? Ripping out old trees for the promise of gold years down the road? Talk about evil fruit!

Here in North America, unless you have some redoubtable Arkansas Blacks stashed away, March is the bleakest time of the apple year. It's been five months since the harvest, and reenforcement won't arrive from the Southern hemisphere until April. The first local apple is still a season away, leaving most of us with the basic industrial apples from which to choose. Fortunately those are still sound and sweet. My personal five favorites are after the break. Jazz Many similar apples compete at the market this time of year, very sweet, crisp, and dense. Jazz may be the best of this lot for its delicate floral-and-orange-juice flavors. Empire Crisp, vinous, and reasonably well balanced, Empire is most like the classical North-east varieties. Now that Macouns are ending, I'll probably eat a lot...