Apple season is upon us
October 21, 2023 by DarcieWe are just at peak apple season, and every roadside stand and farmers market is brimming with bushel baskets of local apples. If you are lucky, there could be upward of a dozen varieties for you to choose from, with a range of characteristics. Some are perfect for eating out of hand, others are great for making cider or applesauce, and a few are all-around winners. It’s tempting to think we live in a golden age of apples, as new varieties are introduced every year. But as Matthew Zuras explains at Epicurious, our choices are modest compared to what was available over 100 years ago.
Zuras says that in the mid 1800s in the US, there were over 17,000 named varieties of apples. Less than a third of those remain today, and the options available for consumers to purchase are much more limited. Since apples are not native to the US, you many wonder how we got so many varieties in the first place. The answer lies in apple genetics – apples, like humans, inherit a full set of genes from both parents. If you plant a seed from a Honeycrisp apple, the fruit you would get from the resulting tree wouldn’t be Honeycrisp, and you would be rolling the dice as to whether it would be crips and sweet or lip-puckeringly sour. The only way to get more Honeycrisp apples is to take cuttings from a Honeycrisp tree and graft them onto another rootstock. In essence, all commercial apples are clones.
A variety of factors led to the decline of multitudinous cultivars, as Zuras explains. One reason many types of apples were lost was Prohibition. Apples could be used to make hard cider, so entire orchards were destroyed to prevent anyone from using the apples in this manner. Now the tide seems to have turned, and botanists are busy developing new types of apples. We may never have 17,000 varieties again, but we have plenty from which to choose. There are several small orchards around the town where I live, and I enjoy trying as many kinds of apples as I can. My current favorites are Honeygold for eating out of hand and Haralson, Wealthy, and Fireside for baking. What’s your favorite variety of apple?
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