Adam's Apples

Open almost any page in Roger Yepsen's Apples to find a charming tableau. On the right-hand page is a watercolor painting of an apple, rendered by the author with reverent realism. Facing on the left is a verbal sketch of the apple. These are not long. Several comprise only three sentences. The images float on the white page. The text, though brief, tells the essential things you'd want to know about each variety, including origin, character, and time of peak ripeness. When you are done with one apple, turn the page for another. There are more than a hundred of these.

A very happy 2018 to you! I am pleased, and a little surprised, to look back on this blog in 2017 and see a healthy number of posts, including 22 apple reviews.

I neglected to store my Suncrisps properly, and they wrinkled up. Inside however the meat of the apple was still sound, and filed with intense flavors of caramel and brown sugar.

A reader provided this photo of an ice-encrusted Cortland apple in Harvard, Massachusetts, yesterday.

I thought my previous review would be the last for 2017, but happily a reader from Washington State decided to send SugarBee my way. Thank you, John! The moment I unpacked these, something said " Honeycrisp " to me. It isn't size: these are large but not nearly as big as the H bomb. Nor is it shape. I think its the orange tinged blush, which also has shimmery quality, at least in artificial light. That is Hcrisp-esque. Either that, or I am just sensitive lately about Honeycrisp's outsized influence on the apple world, and was unconsciously triggered by the S word in SB's name. In any case, my gut reaction proved true, see below.

I am a sucker for this kind of look, a mix of colors layered provocatively. Here russet tops the reddish orange blush, but on other samples the underlying yellow is also visible and sections of the blush are an almost peachy orange red. This interplay of colors on Kidd's Orange Red is further enlivened—or muddled—by large indistinct lentical dots smeared like the markings on an animal's pelt.

I didn't think I'd get a crack at EverCrisp, a ballyhooed Honeycrisp successor, for several more years. But today I have two.