Adam's Apples

I conclude my long deep dive into Braeburn with two examples bought at a local farmers market on October 20. The project was inspired by a comment from a reader , who suggested that Braeburn was a fickle, variable apple that could not be relied upon to be the same from harvest to harvest or day to day.

There is something a little forelorn about the last market of the year.

Another year, and another photo of a raw, wet ending to farmers market in Arlington earlier today. There goes the punch bowl, just as the party was getting good.

There were 24 kinds of apples at the farmer's market in Union Square (Somerville) earlier today.

My two Shizuka apples are large and spring green, slightly oblate spheres decorated with crackles of tan russet and darker green lenticels that have small light centers. One of my samples, shown, has a faint pink-orange blush in a region of peel that is almost yellow. (It also has some tiny bruises.)

I love this time of year.

Hype about Mountain Rose has become a cloud of uncertainty about these apples. Are they the same as Airlie Redflesh, aka Hidden Rose ? The stroke of a knife will help shed light on that.

 JUST NOT GREAT, THIS YEAR We've had an unusually wet growing season this year, and the apples have soaked up the water and grown fat. A juicy apple is nice, but not every variety benefits qualitatively from this aqueous bounty.

Macoun King David Macoun , the queen of vinous apples, is just not 100% if grown in Virginia. King David , apple of the South, does not reach its peak here in New England. I shall miss Macoun. I am not going anywhere. But the climate is. The Nature Conservancy finds that the climate in neighboring Vermont is likely to " become like that of southern Virginia ." The good news, I guess, is that Virginia boasts some great apples. They just aren't the ones that do well up here, for the most part. The ones linked intimately with our sense of place. The ones we love. Sure, people grow northern apple...

In my review of this apple ten years ago, I hoped to revisit Priscilla once better samples came my way. These are a few weeks earlier and better, one a squat medium and the other quite large and a bit tapered. They have a little ribbing and a lovely deep red blush, streaky in spots, over yellow, attractively freckled with tiny light lenticel dots.