44.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Taking a strong position in apple stock
One of the sweetest compensations for the end of summer and the turn toward winter is the apple. It is sad to say goodbye to cherries and peaches and plums, but apples take center stage in October and they hang on well into winter. Under the right conditions, apples can be stores for five to six months. Try that with a peach!
Plums, peaches and cherries don’t have the same cultural, mythological and historical power as apples. Eve didn’t pick a plum in the Garden of Eden. Snow White’s evil stepmother didn’t offer her a peach. And it’s apples that have medicinal properties scientists say help prevent colon, lung and stomach cancer.
Apples have history. It is said that Alexander the Great enjoyed dwarf apples in Macedonia in 300 B.C. Today, there are some 7,500 different cultivars, with qualities ranging from tooth-aching sweetness to mouth-puckering tartness. China produces about 35 percent of the world’s apples, and the U.S. comes in second in global production.
The first apples arrived here with the colonists in the 1600s, and the first apple orchard was established in the Boston area in 1625. Unlike the orange, which belongs to Florida, and the peach, which belongs to Georgia, the apple belongs to the Northeast. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it should be. Up and down the Hudson Valley this time of year, apples go from tree to table in a matter of days. They are a local product, and it shows.
In the ’80s we took our kids apple-picking every year. It was one of those activities actually as good as you expected it to be. The picnic lunch, the freedom of running through the orchards, the climbing and collecting, and then the eating and baking and cooking apple sauce comprised a perfect day. Even the bee stings and poison ivy were worth it.
One of the places we often went was in Croton, N.Y. Last weekend, caught up in a blast of nostalgia, my husband and I decided to return to the orchard Sunday afternoon to pick some apples, eat some fresh donuts and bring home some Macouns for snacking and baking.
