Adam's Apples

Not the shoe and not the fabric, today's fruit is named for its unusual deep color and a county in western Maine. It is small and quite dark, spattered with rust-colored lenticels like some polished victorian curio of exotic hardwood or stone. The blush is a deep red with purple overtones, almost mahogany, sometimes described as having a blackish bloom. The apple is slightly ribbed and classically shaped, round to conical. Its unbroken peel has a faint grassy smell.

Besides the blush, this apple is really two-toned: a banana yellow (sure enough) tinged a little with green, and a distinctly green-yellow hue. Flecked with brown lenticels, the resemblance to the long tropical fruit is clear, if not necessarily obvious. The blush is small, a light pink whose translucency, over the yellow, makes a peachy orange. The general effect is striking. The apple runs medium to large and is ribbed and slightly conical. The skin is naturally waxy. A week off the tree it is firm and has a sweet grassy fragrance.

"Ananas" is "pineapple" in French. This small-to-medium variety is ribbed and conical. I selected the apple for today's photoshoot for its striking lime-green stripes over a lighter spring green. However, some other samples have distinctly yellow regions, and one has a pale orange blush over one third of its surface.

What a pretty color! Thome is a sport of Empire —a genetic mutation, with but a single parent. Looks count at the market, so a sport that is redder or more attractive than its parent can be valuable. The fruit is medium to large and ribbed, a slightly elongated sphere. The deep plum-purple blush is decorated by many small light lenticels and a dusty blue bloom. It's nice and firm.

The variegated skin of this ironically named antique mixes shades of yellow green and green yellow in an attractive way. You can see what little blush there is, faint spotty brownish orange, in the photo on the tops of the lobes of this ribbed apple. The lenticels are dark and the peel—see it shine?—is waxy. This variety is also known as Palmer Greening, which was apparently the more popular name in New England. It is hard to know which name to use today, but it is mostly an academic question, since it is so little grown.

Jona-gored? Worst name ever, but let's eat it. This apple is "just" a sport of Jonagold , but is redder and much, much bigger. My sample approached King Luscious territory , and was far from the largest in the bin.

Large and prominently ribbed with distinct lobes, Lyscom has an open calyx and a very shallow stem well. Its blush is a streakey blotchy wash of dull red and purple over green: the effect is almost brown in places. Large Lyscom unbroken has a sweet grassy aroma and a firm feel. The flesh is light yellow, moderately crisp, and slightly coarse. Lyscom's flavor is balanced with some tartness, pear at first giving way to some astringent notes: lemon, spice, and a vinous quality.

This large, classically shaped apple is visually striking, with a variegated blush (quite deep red in spots, but mostly streaky over yellow) and some unusual effects from russet and other superficial defects. Of course this sort of thing is the kiss of death in the big-time fruit world, where obsession with physical perfection has been known to compromise quality. But this fruit is from an organic farm and wears its blemishes like dueling scars. I find it ruggedly handsome.

Seldom sought (or grown), obscure Ben Davis is the sire of sturdy stalwart Cortland.    Ben is a big ribbed guy with a streaky red blush over a bright yellow green. The blush is almost granular, like small discrete blobs of pigment washed over a green canvas. His calyx is dry and open.  My sample is nobbed and gnarled and host to a harmless skin condition called sooty blotch. It is quite firm and, unbroken, has a sweet yeasty fragrance.

Proposition: Today's apple, crunchy, juicy, and flavorful, is the un-Honeycrisp. I have two Topaz apples, one medium sized and one quite large. Both are ribbed oblate spheres with an attractive red blush, streaky over a vivid yellow green. Tan lenticels are of varying size. The whole apple is rock hard (but not to the tooth, see below).

The green apple with the Dutch name is on the large end of medium-sized and moderately rubbed. Beneath all that superficial sooty blotch (this is from Tower Hill's very-low-spray heirloom orchard ), Swaar is two-toned, a bright spring green over a greenish yellow. There is a subtle hint of orangey coppery blush in a few spots; click on the photo for a better look. Russeted lenticels are all but lost in the intricate tattoo of russet, flyspeck, and the previously noted blotch.

Davey (rhymes with "savvy," not "gravy") is medium-sized, conical, and lightly ribbed. Its attractive red blush is a little striped and streaked over a yellow peel that is much greener at the crown than the base. Large green-yellow lenticels are prominent in the blush--many at the base thinning to none at the crown. Davey's calyx is partly open. The apple is firm and has a pretty cidery aroma.

An unexpected perquisite of this blog is that sometimes people send me apples to try. (Okay, twice. But a man can dream.) Today's variety is just such a gift, picked and mailed in early October. Smokehouse, named for the proximity of its ur-tree to a Pennsylvania smokehouse, ranges from medium to large.

Hutchins Farm reports that this apple, a sport (apparently) of Empire , has no name. Nature abhors a vacuum, so we will use Hutchins's home-grown appellation. * This sport is very large and moderately ribbed, with a red blush that is mostly streaky over a bright yellow-green.  Many small light lenticels decorate the blush, which manages to be quite dark in places, and as the photo shows there are some jagged swaths of what I take to be russet. (Or perhaps it is something else?)

This variety is either old or very old, and may be a parent of the popular McIntosh . There is a family resemblance. Fameuse is a medium-sized apple, round and firm, with a red blush that is streaky in most places over yellow-green (about a third of the skin is unblushed in my samples). Its calyx is closed.

This pretty variety, a large medium, is mostly an unblushed yellow. Though the blush is often streaky, it ranges from a saturated red to a faint orange-pink wash. (It's quite solid on one sample). The lenticels are dark. Lucky is ribbed and well-formed, a bit conical.

This large-medium - sized apple is conical and distinctively ribbed: one jutting corner of my sample cleaves the air like the prow of a ship. The peel is delicately colored with green streaks over a lighter green, but some samples have a small fragile pink blush. There are light lenticels, and my sample has flyspeck, sooty blotch, and a corona of russet flairing out fron the stem well.

Like Early Spy , this is another apple with a purely "local" name. But it beats "NY428," this apple's official designation as part of the breeding program of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station . Sister is named for her relationship to the better-known Fortune, which was originally NY429.

Elstar is generally medium-sized, with some variation. It is moderately ribbed with a streaky red blush over yellow, and with tan, nearly invisible lenticels (a few have dark specks in the center). This apple is firm with a sweet aroma that suggest the Golden Delicious variety. (Aptly so, as it turns out.)

Crossing Northern Spy with Golden Delicious can get you a huge apple, at least if Spigold is any indication. This lopsided, oblate, and very slightly ribbed variety has a dull red blush streaky over a light green yellow. Its light tan lenticels look smaller in the blushed area. Unbroken Spigold feels hefty and firm with a sweet cidery aroma.