Apples and Their Juicy Stories
They’re just delicious!
How do you like your apples? Baked in a pie? Sweet apples right off the tree? Sour Granny Smiths juiced for a tart drink?
I was pretty bored with apples as a kid, because Mom would always put a Red Delicious apple in my lunch bag, which is about the most tasteless apple in existence. It wasn’t until I discovered heritage/heirloom apples as an adult that I fell in love with them.
There was an apple tasting at an organic farm one year that I was lucky enough to attend, and the huge variety of shapes and tastes blew me away. There was the Hidden Rose, a yellow-skinned apple with pink flesh that tastes like strawberry lemonade, and the green with red speckles Gravenstein with its sweet-tart taste (but you have to eat it fast, because it oxidizes quickly). There’s the red Knobbed Russet with random bumps all over it and an earthy flavor, and the Belle de Boskoop, a very large apple with really sweet taste, as well as the tiny Dolgo Crab with a zingy flavor. The Black Oxford has deep purple skin and white flesh, and a quietly sweet flavor.
I got to taste over 30 varieties of apple that day, from ping-pong size to as wide as my hand, from puckeringly tart to honey sweet to almost potato-y earthiness, and it was a marvelous experience. I plan to attend as many apple tastings around the world as I can in future travels.
Apple Facts
Apples are in the rose family, Rosaceae, as well as almonds, apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums, quince, raspberries, strawberries and 4,000 others.
There are about 7,500 varieties of apple grown around the world.
You can’t grow the same apple from a seed (the pip) of the one you just ate. Every pip grows into a slightly different apple, and they often revert to something like their more sour ancestors. If you fell in love with the apple you just ate and want to grow the exact same apple, you must go back to the tree it came from and get a cutting, then graft it onto hearty rootstock.
If you cut an apple cross-wise, inside you’ll find a five-pointed star.
Sweet dried apples were a holiday treat in Dickens’ time.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” became a saying because of their high fiber content. They also reduce blood pressure with high potassium content.
Apple Myths
If you’re bobbing for apples and you manage to catch one with your teeth and then eat a bite, you’ll be able to see the path to the land of Faery.
If you fall asleep in an apple orchard, you may awaken years later.
Johnny Appleseed scattered apple pips everywhere he went because he wanted people to eat more apples. False! Those pips grew up into sour apples that were perfect for making alcoholic hard apple cider, which most pioneers drank daily because they didn’t trust the water.
The Tree of Knowledge was an apple tree. Nope! Apples don’t grow in the Middle East. (It would probably have been a pomegranate.) Apples originated in Kazakhstan, thousands of miles away.
Greek mythology has the golden apples of immortality growing in the Garden of the Hesperides (the evening stars), guarded by a hundred-headed dragon.
In the Poetic Edda, Idunn/Ithunn is the goddess of apples of eternal youth.
In Celtic mythology, after death, good pagans would go to the Apple Land, the land of eternal spring.
So you can see, both in science and in myth, apples give you long life.
(Heirloom apple info from Homesteading.com and GardenandHappy.com. Some facts from History Extra, some myths from Lore Central, and both facts and myths from Wikipedia.)
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