‘Ashmead’s Kernel’, ‘Roxbury Russet’, ‘Belle de Boskoop’, ‘Pink Pearl’, ‘Winter Banana’ … The names of antique and rare apple varieties are part poetry, part history lesson. Many go back centuries, some as far as the Renaissance. The tiny ‘Lady’ apple, also known as the ‘Pomme d’Api’, was first recorded under that name in 1628, but may have been cultivated by the Romans. Most of the old varieties we know today, though, sprang up around the turn of the 19th century, when John Chapman (a.k.a. “Johnny Appleseed”) departed Massachusetts for the nascent Northwest Territory of Ohio and points west, planting nurseries as he went. By 1905, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture commissioned a report on all known American apple varieties, researchers counted some 14,000 unique types.
Today, only about 100 are grown commercially in any volume, but after decades of ‘Red Delicious’ dominance, the old apples are finding a new audience–especially here in New England, where more and more savvy growers are swapping some of their ‘Cortland’ trees for ‘Calville Blanc d’Hiver’ and ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’. These antique stunners have flavors and aromas that run from toasted nuts to honeyed champagne to lemonade, and tasting them is like discovering an entirely new fruit species.
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BEST Apple Orchards in New England!
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
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