[Sca-cooks] Historical Apples

Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com
Sun Oct 26 14:41:35 PDT 2008


I just did a major article on apples. (It's still in press, so I can't
refer anyone to a link yet.)
One thing that I noted was that the
number of commercial varieties is perhaps 10% of the number of varieties
that might be grown in a state. Perhaps 14 are grown commercially out of 100
or more found in the state.
Martha Stewart did an article in the October issue on heirloom apples
and included a list of pick your own antiquarian apple orchards--
http://www.marthastewart.com/article/a-slice-of-history?autonomy_kw=apples&rsc=header_5

Perhaps the judges wanted a sentence in the documentation that read--
"I do not live on a farm or have sufficient land to cultivate my own produce
and meats. Also lacking a 15th (14th, 16th, substitute as needed) market 
I used products from the local organic
market and superorganic mart."

Johnnae
This reminds me that I also have a list of mid 17th century French apple 
varieties
that I need to shape into an article. .... always another article

Lilinah wrote:
> Apples are so common... and yet... i know that many of the varieties 
> most commonly found in the supermarket are fairly recent hybrids. And 
> i have trouble finding many of the apples i remember from 40 years 
> ago. I've read that modern apples are being bred to be sweeter and 
> sweeter, although we can still find some tart apples in the supermarket.
> This curiosity was brought on by a recent cooking competition in which 
> a couple judges were complaining that an entrant had not use period 
> apples, as if we can find them in the supermarket. snipped
> So, what varieties are available today (without growing one's own) 
> that are period or close to period? Are Pippins as close as we can 
> get? (crab apples are an awful lot of work for a feast)



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