I must share a wonderful article from Yankee Magazine. Many years ago, when we were first married, my in-laws gave us a subscription. It was interesting, but not so much so that I've missed it in the many years since we let our subscription lapse. But recently I came upon "The Heirloom Apple Hunters," and was overwhelmed by a wave of homesickness for the Northeast. I've come to love Florida; what's more, New York and New England have changed far too much for me to want to move back there. But oh how I miss the scents of autumn, the nip of cool air after summer, the play of light on multi-colored leaves—and I especially miss the apples.
"The Heirloom Apple Hunters" is what I was looking for, and didn't find, when I read Endangered Eating. I am so happy that there are still those who remember what apples, and apple cider, once tasted like. When apples sparkled with variety, and a broad spectrum of taste. It's good to know that a few ("the happy few") are putting action to their longing, and labor to rescue the perishing, even among the vegetable kingdom.
Here are a few personal keywords that leapt out at me, and which might pique the interest of some of my readers: Maine, Colby College, Black Oxford, Blue Pearmain.
And the usual short quotes:
Welcome to the Maine apple hunt: an ad hoc effort to save heritage apples, the rare survivors of a vast and nearly vanished orchard landscape once filled with thousands of varieties. According to a 1905 catalog by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, some 14,000 kinds of apples were grown between 1804 and 1904, mostly in small orchards on land too marginal for other crops. There were apples as small and red as cherries, fruits that were ghostly white and others so dark they looked black, and monstrously pimpled russets. There were others so tart and juicy they tasted effervescent, or left the flavor of banana, coconut, or clove lingering on the tongue. New England in particular had the most diverse and longest history of apple propagation in the country, because colonists here were first to bring trees from abroad, and Maine alone grew more than 600 varieties during this time.
Todd Little-Siebold spends his days off investigating strange apple trees. One October morning, the tree that piqued his interest belonged to a young couple in Penobscot, an 18th-century village along a rocky shoreline of Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula. The couple had connected with Little-Siebold after hearing about the Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a rare French apple thought lost to history that Little-Siebold and fellow apple hunters found four years ago in a neighboring town. This couple wondered whether their own tree might be another Drap d’Or, or some other missing and special Malus domestica.
Little-Siebold was all for it. “My problem is I have AADHD—Apple Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I’m like, ‘Apple! There’s an apple! Let’s go get the apple!’” he says. “It’s addictive. It’s like a treasure hunt every day.”
“These apples weren’t being trademarked; they weren’t even being written about,” says John Bunker, a Maine apple historian who mentors Little-Siebold. ... [B]y the early 20th century, as the agricultural market globalized, apples were being bred more for shelf appeal, durability, and transport than for flavor. Federal agricultural agents encouraged farmers to rip out their unique varieties for lucrative mass-market alternatives like Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and McIntosh. This development, combined with the Great Depression and a pair of catastrophic winters, decimated hundreds of thousands of Maine’s apple trees. The few that survived are now reaching the end of their natural lifespan, just as old farms and undeveloped land are disappearing from Maine’s landscape. “If we’re going to save them,” says Bunker, “we have to do it now.”
Each year, Little-Siebold, Bunker, and the dozen or so other volunteer apple hunters in Maine send samples from up to 40 promising trees to the Washington State DNA lab. The ones confirmed as rare are then grafted onto rootstock at the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity, which Bunker founded as a living archive in 2012. So far, there are about 300 local heritage varieties in the orchard, and over the past six years DNA testing has helped correct about a dozen misidentified varieties.
Maybe someday our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, will again be able to taste the wonders my generation once took for granted and let slip out of our lives. May the Black Oxford tree our grandson planted in his front yard live long and prosper!
