Heirloom apples

[altivo]

Here is a pie made from an heirloom apple variety, Roxbury Russet:



These are a very old apple variety, noted as being excellent for winter storage and well suited to cider making or baking. By modern orchard standards, they are considered "too ugly" to have any commercial value. That's pretty typical of modern shallow thinking. The flavor and scent of this apple is far more complex and intense than that of any widely grown variety today. The flesh is very hard, and I can easily see that they would keep for a long time under ideal conditions. We haven't sampled the pie just yet, but I expect it to be far from mundane.

In other news, the week drags on. It snowed this afternoon, fairly hard in fact, but melted almost immediately. I won another N scale locomotive off Ebay, this one is a steam engine, a 2-8-2 light Mikado style which was one of the last types in use by DT&I before they abandoned steam completely in the early 1950s. It has a Chicago & Northwestern herald painted on it, but I expect I can either cover or remove that to apply the normal DT&I monogram. I wasn't going to buy more stuff until after Christmas, but this was going for such a cheap price that I couldn't pass it up.

Comments

[baphnedia]

Omnomnom?

[altivo]

Yes, it turned out quite well.

[baphnedia]

awesome :)

[schnee]

Mmm, that certainly looks quite tasty.

Funny that the apples are considered "ugly", too; they don't look any different from what I'd expect an apple to look like.

[altivo]

Ah, but you have European notions of what an apple is. Apparently Americans have been trained to think that apples are smooth, symmetrical and shiny. These are rough skinned, lopsided, and not shiny. The color is a sort of patchy brown and green with a little pinkish blush on one side.

You probably also expect a ripe tomato to be soft and juicy. Americans seem to think that a tomato that yields to the touch is "rotten".

[hrrunka]

We have similar issues over here (in supermarkets in the UK), though recently there've been a few more varieties on sale at times. Go find a farm shop here instead, and there'll quite likely be more interesting varieties available (according to season, of course).

[altivo]

Yep. These came from a farmers' market. Gary got them and also a sack full of Northern Spy, my all time favorite apple that I haven't seen for almost 20 years. They were good, too.

One of the Chicago supermarket chains used to do a fall apple festival in October where they'd offer at least two dozen apple varieties. We used to go again and again, bringing home ten or twelve pounds of apples at a time, but eventually they stopped running it. We asked why, and they said they didn't sell enough. Most people just head for the red 'delicious' (a misnomer if there ever was one) and don't even consider the others. They've been brainwashed all their lives by the hard sell for that variety or fooled by the dishonest name. It looks pretty, but tastes like sawdust.

[hrrunka]

Sometimes it's the early picking (before the fruit's properly ripe) that does for the flavour of apples. The commonest "green" varieties on UK supermarket shelves are "Granny Smith" and "Golden Delicious". I've not tried the former in its properly ripe state, but the latter, when eaten frsh from a tree having not been picked until it is truely ripe and golden, is a far more flavoursome fruit than the unripe green fruit that appears on the supermarket shelves.

[altivo]

True. Some varieties ripen after picking, but most really don't do much. Of course, commercial interests rarely care about such niceties, and assume that consumers won't know the difference anyway.