The Bounty of an Apple
“Jump out and get us some apples,” my dad would say as he’d pull our old Chevrolet station wagon to the side of a back road deep in the heart of apple country. Never get out on the street side, don’t pick from the trees, only pick up from the ground, make sure it’s a good one and by that he meant no soft spots or bugs. There was an endless supply of plastic grocery bags in his pockets for picking up trash when we were out fishing and of course, for filching apples on our way home. It was more like foraging since apples for sale were only picked off the trees. Anything on the ground was fair game.
Speaking of game, I’ve noticed that small game vests, the fancy waxed canvas ones with padded leather shoulder patches have become fashionable with men of a certain age at market. Dad was always way ahead of the style curve, only his vest was worn to the point of fraying, stained with proof he fed his family when hunting in the orchards. On days he wasn’t a very good hunter, then he’d be a gatherer, his pockets bulging with apples like the cheeks of the squirrels he hunted.
In addition to lots of wild game, while growing up we ate lot of apples. So it struck me as odd when I was at a friend’s home and saw an apple in their compost bucket. Not one swiped from beneath a tree, but one I knew darn well they’d bought at the farmers market, from a farmer I knew who worked terrible long days to get their product to the city each week.
Picking through someone’s garbage is never cool, but my eccentricities for rumaging through cast-offs has been baked in since childhood. Although nothing appeared externally wrong with the fruit it was a week old, fresher ones having been purchased. I washed off the errant coffee grinds and began peeling.
“What are you doing?” they asked in that tone of voice suggesting a serious social faux pas. “You can get as many apples as you want and you pick one out of my compost bin?” I continued peeling to prove my point.
“It’s not even mealy,” I countered before they swiped the fruit from the cutting board and this time deposited it in the trash, a point of no return. If it’s one thing you don’t ever want to do, it’s throw out an apple in the trash. There is so much bounty in those lovely seasonal pomes if one would only consider.
In the coolness of the screened in porch at my parents house there was always an assortment of wooden bushel baskets, bussing totes, and five gallon buckets filled with a colorful assortment of red, green, and golden apples. There were apples for slicing and eating. Some would be cut and made into dried apple rings in the dehydrator. We simple ate them as snacks, but a few times over the years someone from Dad’s side of the family would make a batch of schnitz un knepp, a Pennsylvania Dutch dish of dried apples, pork, and rivels which is a sort of dumpling, sweet and savory, a hearty dish for those who had spent a cool fall afternoon picking apples in the orchard.
My family never made our own cider, but we did make our own applesauce. Applesauce is one of those things that can be made with less than perfect fruit. Each year there comes a time where I have more apples than I can possibly eat fresh. Some people are purists coring and peeling the apples before cooking them soft and mashing by hand. Long gone is the peeling and coring contraption I once had. A paring knife suits me fine. Sometimes I get lazy. I toss whole apples into a stock pot with a splash of cider and a dash of cinnamon and used my handy dandy food mill to remove all the peels and seeds once the fruit has cooked down.
THE thing right now is apple cider donuts. Nope, give me an apple pie, the kind with lid (aka: top crust), preferably warm with a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top. Apples for pie don’t have to be perfect either.
Got one of those juicers that were all the rage? Guess what, you can make your own apple cider which is basically unfiltered raw apple juice. The clear stuff that comes in bottles has been filtered to remove the sediment and then pasteurized to lengthen the shelf life. Back in grandma’s day they juiced the apple peels to make cider. Nothing was ever wasted.
When apples turned brown and shriveled past the point of no return Dad still didn’t throw them out. Instead, he’d wedge them in the crooks of trees and stab them on to stout branches throughout the yard to keep the birds and assorted critters fed during the winter months.
The orchardists and their trees have worked so hard to bring forth the apples so never take the bounty of an apple for granted.