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Today I am tasting the first of a shipment of mystery apples from Will, who grew these in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, near Worcester.
Will got ahold of me hoping for some help IDing his crop.
I warned him that he'd probably be disappointed, since I'm not much of an apple sleuth. He sent his apples anyway. The provisional names are his.
Will believes these were planted a hundred years ago and were likely a popular variety from Stark Bros.
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He sent me two of these, medium and large, with lots of bruises.
They are elongated and just a little conical, yellow with green lenticel dots, but the smaller one (shown) has a small area of streaky, patchy orange blush.
Both are slightly ribbed, resting on five "chins" at the base; the calyx is partially open and at the top the stem is thin. There are a few spots of flyspeck.
Let's eat
These are good tastes and I also find a very faint trace of cocoanut and something citric, more like tangerine than anything else I can think of but not tangerine. In the smaller apple that expresses itself as pineapple.
This second set of flavors gives it a tropical character.
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These flavors are good together. Were the texture a bit better this would be a very nice apple. As it is I am pleased to have it to try.
Do I know what it is? Not a bit.
But if Will is right, he might find a match in a 1920 Stark Bros. catalog.
Fun. I do like the name 'Will's 1920' but how about Winter Banana as a guess?
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't know having never tasted the variety myself but it looks the part.
I also don't know about 1920 but Winter Banana was for sale in the 1921 from the catalogue -- see Banana (Winter):
https://archive.org/details/CAT31306627/page/n3
Dave, my guess is not the Banana.
DeleteWinter B is a late apple, not even ripe now, this was from late September.
It's is a hard apple, ligneous hard, like an Arkansas Black, this was soft.
They get pretty good in February, wouldn't mind finding some next month to hoard.