Along with all the culinary benefits from these different varieties comes a healthier, more successful orchard. A diverse orchard is a secure orchard because different trees will respond differently to the pressures of weather, pests, and disease. If one type of apple tree is destroyed, others may still survive. “It’s critical to have a variety of apple trees. Diversity is the key to resilience; it’s also the key to flavor,” Bussey said.
The classes and workshops Bussey offers at Seed Savers Exchange and across the country sell out as soon as they’re posted. He teaches the time-tried skills of grafting, pruning, and identifying apple stock. And the economic prospects for heirloom apples are, in many ways, better than they’ve been in over a century, thanks to the recent resurgence of hard cider, apple wines, and spirits. The astonishing growth in artisanal cideries is helping drive demand for the wilder, more unusual fruit.
Cider apples tend to be small with a large skin-to-flesh ratio. “There’s really nothing new about hard cider,” Bussey said. Until the late 1800s, it was preferred over beer and folks drank it instead of water, which was often unsafe. Even kids drank cider because milk was reserved for making butter and cheese. Good hard cider relies on mostly tart apples, high in tannin, the throat-catching acid most often associated with wine. Cider apples can be so astringent that they are known as “spitters,” but when blended with juice pressed from sweet apples, they help make a nice balance. “And there’s cider vinegar and apple spirits,” Bussey continued. “I know we can distill a brandy as good as any French calvados.
“The challenge we have in trying to restore these apples is in helping people understand their different uses,” Bussey said. “They cover a gamut of flavors and textures and each variety has a purpose. Communicating this information is the hardest part of my work.”
RAFT, Seed Savers Exchange, and orchardists like Bussey are making it possible for researchers, commercial orchardists, and amateurs to preserve and share heritage seeds, learn how to graft and raise apple trees without chemicals, press cider for distilling and drinking fresh, and market their fruit, all funded by foundations, individuals, and grants with scant support from the US government.
“Particularly flavorful apples grow on trees that are deeply rooted in particular kinds of soil and in the rich traditions of particular landscapes,” Bussey said. Widely heralded apples such as Wolf River present a certain terroir, the taste of a place that is influenced by environmental factors, not just genetics alone. Flavor drives Bussey’s work and is becoming the key to reviving the industry.
When your favorite tree gives you too many apples, make sauce. Picking apples is mesmerizing and getting our sons to come down from the Land School’s tree to head home was a challenge. The trunkload of fruit filled the car with the sweet scents of damp grass and decay.
Back in our kitchen, our oldest son, Matt, the most cautious one, sliced the apples to reveal the star in the center and passed them to Tim, the youngest, who took this work seriously and removed the skins with a peeler. Then Kip, the least patient and most easily bored, pitched each half into the pot, a few feet from the counter. On the stove the sauce burbled its cinnamon comfort. They’d take turns stirring the pot until the sauce simmered into a fine, caramel mash.
One indigo afternoon, just as we returned from the orchard, my father called to say he’d landed in town and hoped it wouldn’t be an imposition to spend the night. Because he was an amateur pilot, it wasn’t odd for him to fly cross-country, earning “air miles,” but he never arrived unannounced. That night, he entered the kitchen subdued and weary. What had motivated the trip, and why was he so downtrodden? A spat with my mother? A business setback? Distracted by homework, dinner, baths, and applesauce, I didn’t ask.
But what I recall now is how, as he sat at the table, he relaxed in the glow of a Scotch in his hand, seemingly soothed by the boys, who scrambled up on his lap and hopped down to stir sauce. The kitchen filled with good smells while he shared stories of his war years on an escort ship in the Pacific and then of “bumming” through Alsace, France, and the orchards and the calvados of our exotic ancestral home.
The other day, our now twenty-five-year-old son, Kip, invited me over for dinner, and as I tripped over the bushel of apples in his doorway, it wasn’t hard to discern that he needed my help making applesauce and apple butter. As we peeled and sliced I realized that apples embody the endless qualities of motherhood: of risk, comfort, and promise. Cooking in my son’s kitchen, I was knocked back into the presence of my father and of our boys in the trees, and into the moments of reckless joy balancing on branches myself.
Some say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but as our sons mature, I watch myself becoming the child of my children, just as my father sought parental comfort from me. As I witness my sons’ journeys into adulthood, I vicariously experience their delights and disappointments, a privilege and a curse. I seem to grow older and younger at once, as the child I was, the mother I used to be, and the grandmother I hope to become collapse together.
In the late 1950s, when small orchards and regional markets began to give way to huge West Coast growers and supermarket chains, the range of apple varieties shrank. By the 1970s the selection of apples in most supermarkets was limited to the McIntosh, Red Delicious, and Golden Delicious. Apple breeders were aiming to create durable, long-lasting, and attractive fruit that grew quickly and was easy to pick. But beautiful-looking apples often taste terrible. Price, not quality, was a determining factor as growers and grocers engaged in a race to see who could produce the largest yields and the lowest prices. In just a few decades, the commercial apple industry had turned this once delicious, portable, healthful snack into a bland product no one wanted. The ubiquitous, insipid Red Delicious gave all apples a bad rap.
In the early 1980s the sudden popularity of Granny Smith (England), Fuji (Japan), and Braeburn (New Zealand) apples proved that shoppers would pay more for a less-than-perfect apple if it tasted good. That’s when the apple-breeding program at the University of Minnesota began work on the Honeycrisp apple. Like Apple’s Macintosh computer, the U of M’s Honeycrisp upset the industry’s cart. Growing and selling apples would never be the same.
The U of M’s apple-breeding program is the nation’s oldest and largest. Funded by the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided research and development money to land-grant universities for the promotion of agriculture, by the early 1970s the program had released twenty-seven new varieties of apples—including Beacon, Haralson, and Prairie Spy—beloved by Minnesotans for their range of flavor and cooking qualities, but unknown in the rest of the country.
On its thirty-acre parcel of rolling hillside—about thirty miles west of Minneapolis, near the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum—the U of M’s research orchard is planted with over twenty thousand apple trees. To make apple crosses, pollen from one promising variety is swabbed onto the stamen of another, and then the flowers are bagged to keep out pollen from other trees.
The apple that grows on the branch will be true to the mother tree’s DNA, the seeds will contain equal parts of both parents’ genes, and every seed is distinct. The idea is to combine the best characteristics of both parents into trees that produce apples with a unique identity. Then the budding trees are grafted onto rootstock the next summer so that in about five years there will be new varieties that may become the next big apple. The successful results are then grown out for several years in a test orchard that replicates commercial conditions.
Dr. David Bedford, a U of M senior research fellow, credits the Honeycrisp’s success to its especially sweet flavor and extraordinarily