Popular pomology

A friend alerted me to a short broadcast about apples that aired on Boston's WGBH radio last month. ¶ 

The focus was on New England apples. It's streamable any time and available as a podcast. ¶ 

The April 27 episode of Under the Radar with Callie Crossley includes a 25-minute interview with Amy Traverso and Sean Turley that quickly gets into the good stuff.

Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee Magazine and the author of the Apple Lover's Cookbook. Turley is the author of Practical Pomology: A Field Guide and is an all-around interesting Maine apple dude.

Tune in, turn on

Crossley is a great interviewer. It does not take us long to get from the Tian Shan mountains and Johnny Appleseed to DNA testing, genetic diversity, and the meaning of the phrase "extreme heterozygosity."

Turley gets us into Maine's great endowment of apples, and Traverso brings apples into the kitchen and reflects on shifts in popular taste for the pomacious fruit.

Both share with us a sense of the absolute pleasure that comes from knowing apples. Traverso's gentle encouragement to explore the vast universe of apples beyond the modern Honeycrisp varieties is, of course, very much after my own heart.

I learned some things, and you will too. Use this link to stream or search for Under the Radar on your podcast app.

The interview begins about two minutes in.

Photo: Blend Archive / Unsplash