Adam's Apples

The Blue Pearmain runs to deep red. The apple gets its name from a dusty blue bloom it often wears. (Photo:  Blue Pearmain )  Many apples bloom, not just the Blue Pearmain.

Got these two truly great apples at farmers market on Wednesday.  ¶  To be specific, there's McIntosh , the tart, balanced king of autumn in these parts. A steal at $2.50/lb.  ¶  Next to it is the Chestnut Crabapple , a little wonder that is not to be missed. Proudly marked "Heirloom," it went for $4.00/lb. (!). So, what makes it an "heirloom"?

BOTTOMS UP  ¶  I've called them "chins" and have also heard "feet." The question, however, is about the true name of the bumps on the calyx end of the apple.  ¶  The answer is crown.

There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Gala trees in the world today.  ¶  They are clones, genetically identical to the first Gala bred in New Zealand and grown from seed nearly 100 years ago. Indeed, they are that tree, in that each is a link in an unbroken chain of living tissue from the mother tree, grafted and regrafted onto countless sets of roots .

The best apples are a blend of sweet and tart.  (Photo: Esopus Spitzenberg ; also shown: Opalescent .) These apples are in or near the sweet spot where the tension between sugar and tartness is perfectly balanced and the flavors sing.  ¶  The old pomologists used the term "subacid" to describe an apple that had some acidity in the mix, but which stopped just short of being predominantly acid.

Watercore in a Lady Apple.  ¶  Eat enough apples and you are sure to encounter watercore : strangely translucent, glassy flesh super-saturated with juice and sugar.  ¶  You'd think juiciness would be a straightforward trait specific to each apple variety.  ¶  Coarse-grained apples, with large cells, hold more juice than fine-grained, smaller-cell breeds. Watermelon vs potato. Sometimes however things get a little haywire and the tree forces water, tree-sap really, into the apple so fast that some of it ends up between the cells.

There are many dimensions of apple quality beyond the obvious color, taste, and texture.  ¶  One might want to know, is this apple a good keeper? Does it excel for baking? If you cut it into cubes or slices will it retain its color or turn brown?  ¶  One less-obvious dimension of quality that I have been thinking about a lot this year is, for lack of a better word,  consistency  (or reliability). Namely, how likely it is that an apple will be as good as it usually is.

Sow Carolina Gold rice and you'll generally grow Carolina Gold, the same as the parent. You can save some for seed if you like. Sow seeds from a Honeycrisp apple and, with a little sun and rain, you'll grow apple trees, but not Honeycrisps. Unlike rice, apples do not breed true; apple varieties must be propagated by grafting scionwood onto rootstock .

Professional league apple bobbing? Fruit Quidditch? Nope. Biologically, a sport is a spontaneous mutation that produces offspring with abnormal variation from its parents. Pomologically, there is this added twist. Apples are propagated by grafting, which produces genetically identical trees. An apple sport does not just differ from its two parents, but from itself, or at least its graft antecedent.

Reine  is French for "Queen." So a literal translation of  Reine de Reinettes  (an excellent apple) must be something like, Queen of the, um, what, exactly? Reine de Reinettes Little queens? Princesses? Frogs?

So, what makes an apple an heirloom? Or antique? Is it just a matter of seniority, or is there more to it than that?

A cultivated variety: a breed of plant that is created or sustained by human activity, by propagation. In the case of apples, which do not breed true from seed, all such propagation is by grafting. The reciprocal of apple cultivar, more or less, is the pippin, an apple variety grown from seed. In a sense all cultivars began as pippins. Those not preserved through cultivation become extinct at the death of the ungrafted tree. Modern apple-breeding programs routinely destroy thousands of varieties for every new apple brought to cultivation. Arguably these rejects are cultivars too, though a short-lived. (If so, were they never pippins? Discuss.)

Today we borrow a word from the Very Serious World of wine and ask, is it a useful way to think about apples? Nutty, with a hint of oak? (Orleans Reinette)

Although this word is sometimes just a synonym for apple, especially one that is green and tart, pippin's pomological meaning is an apple grown from seed. Not grafted. Wild, even (It also is slang for a person or thing that is exemplary, a corker, a right good one. Another meaning is just a pip, a seed.) In its apple sense pippin is the opposite of the word cultivar, a plant variety developed and propagated via human cultivation. Simple enough, if you don't look too closely. But think about it and your brain will itch. Because those pippins we know and love? They are all propagated by grafting.

Plant a seed from your favorite apple and you will eventually grow...something else. Apples are extremely heterozygous and do not breed true. Instead apple trees are propagated by grafting—by stitching together a cutting of the desired fruit onto a living stump. (Kevin Hauser has this short video detailing one such grafting technique.) Farmers and nurseries once used any old apple seedling for rootstock, but today they usually choose from rootstocks that cause the tree to bear quickly and/or for size (that is, to grow the grafted variety on dwarf or semidwarf trees). These rootstocks are similarly propagated asexually from clippings : usually some variation of sticking live rootstock clippings into dirt or other medium until they root. (Update : Kevin Hauser also documents that process on video.) Consequently your favorite apple probably grew on a single tree comprising not one but two clones. Incidentally, "Rootstock...

In some of my apple reviews I say that an apple tastes cidery or has hints of cider. Tasting cider in an apple is no great feat, nor is it descriptive since apple cider can comprise many different tastes. I use this word to identify a narrow band of taste, rich and mellow, recalling sweet (not hard) apple cider. It is a flavor of many fine old varieties, such as Jonathan , Nodhead , Northern Spy , Black Twig , Baldwin , and Newtown Pippin , but also crops up in some newer varieties such as Enterprise. It is very like the taste of a freshly bruised apple, rarely dominant, and always (in my experience so far) part of a mix of other tastes, never alone. This flavor is broadly accessible, not challenging to enjoy and appreciate.

Apples are bought by the likes of you and me (with, one hopes, our usual flawless taste). We might be lured by one of those sleek modern names like Zestar or Honeycrisp , crafted to suggest sweetness and a snazzy, jazzy zestfulness. Apple trees, on the other hand, are bought by growers, and sometimes the marketing effort is aimed at them.

The big distributors keep apples fresh by refrigerating them and by suppressing the fruit's natural production of ethylene. This relatively simple hydrocarbon is in effect an apple hormone that triggers ripening, overripening, and rotting. One widely used technique is to store apples in airtight rooms from which oxygen has been reduced (from 21% to about 5% or less). Storage facilities also may control humidity and carbon-dioxide content, and use ethylene scrubbers. These techniques are know as controlled atmosphere storage and facilities are licensed (here are some typical requirements ). The apple industry often just refers to this as "CA."

These are the pores of a plant. Apple lenticels can be distinctive and decorative. Apples breath and transpire through these pores, which may be portals of russet and disease. Some varieties are susceptible to a blight known as lenticel breakdown, which mars the fruit with ugly brown pitting. Lenticel breakdown is especially troublesome for the apple industry as it does not manifest until after packing. It can be aggravated by washing and by some of the chemical treatments to which commercial apples are routinely subject. Gala is especially vulnerable.

This word describes the wine-like flavor of some apples. Vinous apples don't actually taste much like a glass of wine, but they do share a quality of flavor that has wine-like depth and complexity. Think of Homer's wine-dark sea. At least "vinous" has a definite meaning, unlike some of the descriptive terms still kicking around from the old days. I'd tried to write a post about the term "aromatic flavor," which has described apples for hundreds of years, but its practical meaning is even more elusive than that of "sub-acid," which was also a bit of a stumper. Vinous, on the other hand, pegs a recognizable slice of flavor shared by many members of the McIntosh family (and some other varieties). It's not a single flavor but rather a kind of clean and distictive balanced range of taste within which individual flavors play in interesting and pleasing ways. This vinous quality is lighter and more...