Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in silent autumn night.
TENNYSON.
Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrapped
up in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is life
sweetened by its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is more
valuable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound, ruddy
life to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were.
Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little
clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural
antidote of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable
acids and aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and
antiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of
liver, etc.! It is a gentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system.
Then I have read that it has been found by analysis to contain more
phosphorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the proper food of
the scholar and the sedentary man; it feeds his brain and it stimulates
his liver. Nor is this all. Besides its hygienic properties, the apple
is full of sugar and mucilage, which make it highly nutritious. It is
said "the operators of Cornwall, England, consider ripe apples nearly
as nourishing as bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year
1801--which was a year of much scarcity--apples, instead of being
converted into cider, were sold to the poor, and the laborers asserted
that they could 'stand their work' on baked apples without meat;
whereas a potato diet required either meat or some other substantial
nutriment. The French and Germans use apples extensively; so do the
inhabitants of all European nations. The laborers depend upon them as
an article of food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced apples and
bread."
Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair, compared with the
intense, sun-colored, and sunsteeped fruit our orchards yield. The
English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and
chilly climate than in our own.
It is well known that the European maple yields no sugar, while both
our birch and hickory have sweet in their veins. Perhaps this fact
accounts for our excessive love of sweets, which may be said to be a
national trait.
The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but
the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I have
seen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess,
with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste.
The best thing I know about Chili is, not its guano beds, but this fact
which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives
well there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of
apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard. The
tree, indeed, thrives so well, that large branches cut off in the
spring and planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots
and develop into fine, fullbearing trees by the third year. The people
know the value of the apple, too. They make cider and wine of it, and
then from the refuse a white and finely flavored spirit; then, by
another process, a sweet treacle is obtained, called honey. The
children and the pigs eat little or no other food. He does not add that
the people are healthy and temperate, but I have no doubt they are. We
knew the apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really opened
a deep beneath a deep. We had found out the cider and the spirits, but
who guessed the wine and the honey, unless it were the bees? There is a
variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly liquid name that
suggests what might be done with this fruit.
The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenburgs and
greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a
rose when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be
addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it
falls, in the still October days, it pleases the ear. It is a call to a
banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain
hold it, but it can now assert its independence; it can now live a life
of its own.
Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely and
down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, toward
which it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed, to
hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take time to
meditate and ripen! What delicious thoughts it has there nestled with
its fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar into
wine!
How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with
my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or
through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-checked spitz,
or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to
mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out
where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so
alive! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost
expect to see you move! I postpone the eating of you, you are so
beautiful! How compact; how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and
varnished against the rains. An independent vegetable existence, alive
and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding,
wasting away, or almost of repairing damages!
How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeks
of the boys do. A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots only
makes the apple more crisp and vigorous; it peeps out from the chance
November snows unscathed. When I see the fruit-vender on the street
corner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them warm, and
his naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if they do not
ache, too, to clap their hands and enliven their circulation. But they
can stand it nearly as long as the vender can.
Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, following
him, like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes! His homestead is not
planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving
best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the
plow and the pruning-knife: you are indeed suggestive of hardy,
cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate,
chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor
indolence, neither enervating heats nor the frigid zones. Uncloying
fruit,--fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors
only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter
fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a little
hyperborean, leaning toward the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit!
I think you must come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so
sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern
races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is
not akin to you. Not spices or olives, or the sumptuous liquid fruits,
but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness, is akin to you. I
think if I could subsist on you, or the like of you, I should never
have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or
despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality, I
should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived,
and should shed warmth and contentment around.
Is there any other fruit that has so much facial expression as the
apple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with that
single eye of theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough?
The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youth
recognizes the seek-no-further, buried beneath a dozen other varieties,
the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtown
pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gillyflower. He goes to the great
bin in the cellar, and sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered
wealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes coming
plump upon them, sometimes catching a glimpse of them to the right or
left, or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of many
varieties.
In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of touch. There is
not only the size and shape, but there is the texture and polish. Some
apples are coarse-grained and some are fine; some are thinskinned and
some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch,
another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy
lining; a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple
has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck.
What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettily with
its own flesh,--the wine apple? Some varieties impress me as
masculine,--weatherstained, freckled, lasting, and rugged; others are
indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mildflavored,
white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger. The practiced hand
knows each kind by the touch.
Do you remember the apple hole in the garden or back of the house, Ben
Bolt? In the fall, after the bins in the cellar had been well stocked,
we excavated a circular pit in the warm mellow earth, and, covering the
bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in basketful after basketful of
hardy choice varieties, till there was a tent-shaped mound several feet
high of shining variegated fruit. Then, wrapping it about with a thick
layer of long rye straw, and tucking it up snug and warm, the mound was
covered with a thin coating of earth, a flat stone on the top holding
down the straw. As winter set in, another coating of earth was put upon
it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry stable manure, and the
precious pile was left in silence and darkness till spring. No marmot,
hibernating under ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cozy
and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant privacy and quiet. Then how
the earth tempers and flavors the apples! It draws out all the acrid
unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtle refreshing taste of
the soil. Some varieties perish, but the ranker, hardier kinds, like
the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple, or the russet, or
the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes
gold, and the bitter becomes sweet!
As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches,
the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe
we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the
inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and
bright as when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath,
which the hand soon exposes, is just as bright and far more luscious.
Then, as day after day you resort to the hole, and, removing the straw
and earth from the opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you
have a better chance than ever before to become acquainted with your
favorites by the sense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to the
right and left! Now you have got a Talman sweet; you imagine you can
feel that single meridian line that divides it into two hemispheres.
Now a greening fills your hand; you feel its fine quality beneath its
rough coat. Now you have hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face;
now a Vandevere or a King rolls down from the apex above and you bag it
at once. When you were a schoolboy, you stowed these away in your
pockets, and ate them along the road and at recess, and again at
noontime; and they, in a measure, corrected the effects of the cake and
pie with which your indulgent mother filled your lunchbasket.
The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how
he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to
him, and he may steal it if it cannot be had in any other way. His own
juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws sap. His
fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite. Whether
he be full of meat or empty of meat, he wants the apple just the same.
Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy munches
apples all day long. He has nests of them in the haymow, mellowing, to
which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle, having access
through the open door, smells them out and makes short work of them.
In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the
hand of the dead, that they may find it when they enter paradise. In
northern mythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age.
The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave apples
less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating
them on the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your
hand not constantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has aples
and you have none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard;
when you lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's
night by the fireside with not thought of the fruit at your
elbow,--then be assured you are no longer a boy, either in heart or in
years.
The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in its season,
as others do with a pipe or a cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or
is bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats
an apple, sometimes several of them. Whe he takes a walk he arms
himself with apples. His traveling-bag is full of apples. He offers an
apple to his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief
solace when on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He
tosses the core from the car winedow and from the top of the
stage-coach. He would, in time, make the land one vast orchard. He
dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the first
taste. Then he knows that the best flavor is immediately beneath the
skin, and that in a pared apple this is lost. If you will stew the
apple, he says, instead of baking it, by all means leave the skin on.
It improves the color and vastly heightens the flavor of the dish.
The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters. It
belongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish.
I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, do doubt, to be eaten
after the sermon, on his way home, or to his next appointment. They
would take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be
apt to grow tiresome with tow big apples in his coat-tail pockets?
Would he not naturally hasten along to "lastly" and the big apples? If
they were the dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly
would.
How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down
or were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the
divided tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In
some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large
dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour
fruit, too, but sweet in those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who
was one of these heroes of the stump, used every fall to make a journey
of forty miles for a few apples, which he brought home in a bag on
horseback. He frequently started from home by two or three o'clock in
the morning, and at one time both he and his horse were much frightened
by the screaming of panthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through
which the road led.
Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of New
England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse among
our rural population the apple has been, the company growing more merry
and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round! When
the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were
complete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in the
country, known as "apple-cuts," now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so
many things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and more
loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and
the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a
country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in
which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and
agricultural districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and
Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which
generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the
orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize
the country, and to give the place of which it is an adjunct a settled,
domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any
scene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the
sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a
wild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building-site
for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal
apple-trees near by,--regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble,
who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who
have blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and
borne fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from
human contact, and who have nourisbed robins and finches in their
branches till they have a tender, brooding look! The ground, the turf,
the atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man
than that of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the
soil more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the
elements, and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the
landscape around.
An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences, dating from
childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the
orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played there
as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a
thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or
reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted
them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar
history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop
of birds,--robins, goldfinches, kingbirds, cedar-birds, hairbirds,
orioles, starlings,--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and
fitly described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard."
Whether the pippin and sweet bough bear or not, the "punctual birds"
can always be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study
ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of
the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the
season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen
apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs,
the woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for
ants. The redbird comes, too, if only to see what a friendly covert its
branches form; and the wood thrush now and then comes out of the grove
near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller
hawks know that this is a most likely spot for their prey, and in
spring the shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed
on the fine insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here
also, and hither come from the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit.
The latter will put his head through the boy's slipper-noose any time
for a taste of the sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk
esteem its seeds a great rarity.
All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much as the cow.
The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and
fences must be well looked after. No need to assort them or to pick out
the ripe ones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best about
it. I heard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them down
from the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple
sometimes fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more
apples fell. She then took the hint, and rubbed her shoulder with such
vigor that the farmer had to check her and keep an eye on her, to save
his fruit.
But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted
about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
pastures! The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down, to be sure, but they are hers, and why
should she not?
What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearly as
marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for
instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple,--wide-branching like
the oak; its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one of
my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the bellflower, with
its equally rich, sprightly, uncloying fruit.
Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a
feast in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of the Talman
sweet in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of
the most wholesome of all desserts. Or the red astrachan, an August
apple,--what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a
household at this season by a single tree of this fruit! And what a
feast is its shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white
flesh has reached the tongue! But the apple of apples for the household
is the spitzenburg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors.
It can stand the ordeal of cooking, and still remain a spitz. I
recently saw a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a
fruit-grower in the northern part of New York, who has devoted especial
attention to this variety. They were perfect gems. Not large,--that had
not been the aim,--but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How
intense, how spicy and aromatic!
But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivated
fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces
fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the
apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that
most of the wild, unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and
ungenial districts the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild
apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had,
Thoreau's sauce of sharp, November air to be eaten with. At the foot of
a hill near me, and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant
specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the
clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is of
good size, and the color of a tea rose. Its quality is best appreciated
in the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality, and so
remarkable for its firmness and density that it is known on the farm
where it grows as the "heavy apple."
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree
are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious
piece of writing. It has a "tang and smack" like the fruit it
celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner.
It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness
of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts, and
was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten indoors.
Late in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge
of a swamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose," he says,
"that there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must
look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and
rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and
there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I
explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the
withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of
leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns which, with apple
and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie
concealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves
of the tree itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these
lurkingplaces, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw
forth the fruit all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and
hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it
(as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but
still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if
not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If
these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between
the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal
limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an
alderclump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may
have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set,--for I do not refuse the
blue-pearmain,--I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my
steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I
eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance."