Hawkeye Apple

Last week I wrote about the red-fleshed Almata apple. In that blogpost, you might have sensed some disdain for the Red Delicious apple. I wanted to clarify my position. Today, not many people want to eat or pick Red Delicious apples. They associate this variety with the mealy, tasteless apples sold throughout the commercial supermarket system. In truth, the Red Delicious apple was once delicious. That’s how it got its name!

In Peru, Iowa, in the late 1800’s, a farmer, Jesse Hiatt, tried to get rid of an old apple stump from his field, but the tree persisted in sending up shoots. Finally he let it grow, and when it bore fruit, he was so excited by its taste, he named it Hawkeye. It must have had a tangy sharpness. I imagined a taste almost villainous for him to choose such a strong name. Though recently I read that Iowa’s nickname is the hawkeye state . . . so much for poetic imaginings.

Over the years of breeding and grafting, that Red Delicious apple changed, becoming more like a cheap red table wine compared to a complex Bordeaux. Instead of its original creamy interior and variegated outer skin, the apple became more red. I can imagine the growing chant, redder is better. Consumers wanted ruby-red apples like the red apple in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As far as the grower was concerned, the apple needed to be really red, have the Red Delicious characteristic elongated taper, and travel well. Taste was of little concern. Intention equals outcome. Over time, the Red Delicious apple lost much of its original flavor.  

Then in the late 1980’s, the public’s desire for Red Delicious slowed down as new apples, the Granny Smith from New Zealand and the Fuji from Japan, entered the marketplace. Supply and demand. The public no longer wanted to buy Red Delicious, and the apple industry that had relied so heavily on this one apple almost collapsed. 

The Red Delicious trees that we grow here at Old Frog Pond Farm are tasty apples. The flesh is dense and the fruit is both sweet and sharp. Its skin is striped, and it has the traditional five knobs on the blossom end. Picked right from the tree, I always enjoy them. One year I actually tried to promote them with the name, “Hawkeye,”; but no one seemed interested in that name either.

Maybe I will just have to graft more of them over to Almata apples. No one seems to be able to resist that red-fleshed bite.

Desiring the Almata Apple

Malus in Latin means apple, as well as evil. No wonder the apple embodies both good and bad, purity and eroticism.

When I moved to Old Frog Pond Farm, I found many rows of Red Delicious apples growing in the orchard. The flavor of Red Delicious is quite boring as apples go, so I decided I would change them over to another variety. To do this, you need scion wood — the term for the small twigs of first-year growth that are used to graft onto a trunk, branch or rootstock.

I went to a scion wood exchange and grabbed a twig of the Almata apple along with several other varieties that were spread across an old pool table. Not knowing anything about its characteristics, I chose Almata because it was named after one of the largest cities in Kazakhstan, Almaty which translates as “full of apples”.  Almaty is near the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains, the forests that are the birthplace of our domesticated apple. Today, apples, pears, plums, and cherries still grow in the wild in these forests and are sold in the markets of Almaty.  

Scion wood in Red Delicious Trunk

I took my scion wood home and grafted a Red Delicious tree with the Almata twig. Three years later, when this tree developed its first flower buds, I was surprised. Apple blossom buds are usually enrobed in a pink sheath, which then open to pale white flower petals. The Almata buds weren’t pink, but dark red, like the scarlet letter adorning Hester Prynne’s chest in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. Four days later, when the orchard was a cloud of white petals, this tree’s blossoms opened to a lovely pink. When the leaves came in, they were not green but a bronzy color similar to some crab apples. After pollination, its dime-sized apples were dark red, not green, like every other apple in the orchard. 

Reddish Leaves on the Almata

All summer long I kept my eye on this tree. Friends walking with me through the orchard would remark, “What’s that?” pointing to the Almata. It was easy to see that this tree was marked. The apples were quite small, but perfectly formed and deep red. In mid-August, I stopped by the Almata to taste one of its fruits. My large bite of apple exposed deep plum-colored flesh. It was crazy and wonderful, and all wrong. It didn’t look like an apple at all, but more like a ravishing purple plum. It was hard and sour, not yet ripe.

Charmed, I hurried back to the house to share my discovery with my family. I looked up Almata and learned that this red-fleshed apple was developed by Dr. Nels Hansen at the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station. Dr. Hansen was inspired to breed a red-fleshed eating apple after seeing a red-fleshed wild apple on an 1897 trip to Russia. The Almata is the cross he made between a Russian apple, the Beautiful Arcade and Fluke 38, a crabapple.

Almata Fruit

Even though our Almatas were not quite ripe, I decided to use a few of them in an apple galette. The red Almata wove lovely red ribbons through the white apples of the dessert; it held its color even when cooked. I made a Russian apple cake next and was again delighted by the red slices of the Almata flowing through the cake.

Even when fully ripe, the Almata’s taste was still sharp. But biting through its deep red skin and into the ruby-colored flesh, the sensual appeal was greater than biting into any white-fleshed apple.

Although some people say that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was actually a pomegranate, I disagree. I can imagine the serpent winding around a branch, tempting Eve with a ripe, red-fleshed apple. How could she have refused? Would you have resisted? 

If you come for an orchard visit I'll show you the tree. But be prepared; there just might be a snake!

Detail from Apple Ladder: Sculpture LH (She's actually offering an apple to the snake)

Ugly Fruit

In Lisbon, Isabel Soares started a cooperative called Fruta Feia, or Ugly Fruit, a response to the European Union’s restrictions on the appearance of food. No curved cucumbers, no odd-shaped tomatoes. Soares and her colleagues buy these ‘seconds’ from local farms and sell them much less expensively to members of their co-op. She estimates that one third of the food grown in Portugal is wasted because of both market and consumer standards. She wants to change this.

Some young people in Germany have another approach to ‘Ugly Fruit.’ They, too, want to counter the wastefulness of food, but they see ‘ugly’ food as a business opportunity. They want to open stores that specialize in ugly fruit, selling it at a premium. They plan to fill their shelves with odd-shaped potatoes, tomatoes with little penises, and two-legged carrots, oddities that are actually quite common.

My sweetheart, Blase, grows potatoes here at the farm. Quite often he digs up heart-shaped ones. We keep them on the windowsill in the kitchen unless we give them away as gifts. The following spring, Blase plants any that are left. Occasionally, he grows carrots with two twining legs or a tomato with a penis. We appreciate these oddities, but don't charge more for them.  

Photo: Blase Offers a Potato Heart

With apples it’s a different story. Ugly apples are the ones with fungal diseases, or suffering from some pest attack — and no one wants these apples. We don’t have too many ugly apples, but we do have plenty of fruit with small blemishes. I encourage our pickers to appreciate this fruit because it is healthier and more nutritious than the perfect apples in the supermarket.

In Japan the opposite is true. The Japanese have perfected growing 'perfect' apples. Sold in elaborate gift boxes and purchased for special occasions like a birthday, promotion, or graduation, these apples can sell for a hundred and fifty dollars.

The Japanese farmers select the strongest blossoms, and once they are pollinated, enclose each of these flowers in its own double bag. The bag is folded in such a way as to allow for the growth of the fruit, but closed tightly with a wire to keep out insects. The fruit grows for the next several months hidden away from the sun and pests like Rapunzel in the witch’s tower. After three months, the outer bag is removed leaving a colored wax paper one. This colored bag is left on for the next two to ten days so that the apple will color. The last step is to remove all the paper and give the apple time in the sun to finish its coloring and encourage the accumulation of sugars. This is also when the orchardist will apply a stencil to the fruit. Something like, “Happy New Year, Sensei!”, or “Congratulations, Yuki!”

I first came across the phenomenon of fruit stenciling in our orchard when I noticed a leaf stuck to an apple. As I peeled the leaf off the fruit, there was an exact copy of the leaf stenciled onto the apple. Talking about this phenomenon with our resident poet at Old Frog Pond Farm, Susan Richmond, we decided that we will try to stencil words on some apples for next fall. I don’t know what words she has mind, but one of my words will be, Vita, for my granddaughter who will be 15 months at harvest this year. 

Photo: Vita at 5 months enjoying her first OFPF apple.

Over a century ago, the fruit growers in Montreuil outside of Paris, wanting to distinguish their fruit, developed a technique of stenciling images using egg whites and snail slime. At the 1894 St Petersburg Exposition, the French showed off these apples, including a famous one featuring a portrait of the Tsar of Russia.

If you have a suggestion for something we might stencil on an apple, let us know. We haven’t yet figured out our technique, but I imagine we will cut stencils out of some kind of waterproof tape. Still, snail slime is used in fancy French face creams; maybe there’s something to it — and it would be organic.

Winter Tracks

A pack of hungry coyotes visited the orchard. I didn’t know until the next morning when I saw clumps of reddish brown scat — big and fat and filled with seeds and fur and rotten apples — a rich scat bursting with life. Deep holes dotted the rows. The coyotes had smelled the burrowed voles and dug to catch and eat them.  I could see their tracks. My neighbor, Ed, asked if I had heard the coyotes. He said they were yipping most of the night. I said regretfully, “No. When temperatures are in the single digits we sleep with the windows closed.”

When I saw Ed the next day he said that he had seen a lone coyote leaping and twirling among the trees. He imagined she was trying to impress his border collie, Sneakers, and invite him for a tryst. Ed brought Sneakers inside the house — there’s a difference between wild and domestic creatures.

A tracker told me that the way to tell the difference between dog and coyote prints is that the coyote’s are straight, economical, and efficient while the dog’s weave back and forth, wandering here and there, as if continuously distracted. Coyote tracks are more like the long lines of an artist who is confident about her drawing. She is determined to get it right. In fact, before making a brush painting, an artist will often gather mind and body into one great ball of concentration. The release is a very decisive yet spontaneous brushstroke. 

This brush painting by Nantenbo (1839-1925), a Japanese Zen teacher, is of his teaching stick.  Whack! The thick black line is in your face. When I first saw the painting I felt the sting of the stick across my back. Looking at the Nantenbo calligraphy now, I think of the coyotes. That’s how hungry one has to be for food — physical as well as spiritual. Like the coyote, one has to be willing to dig deep, to prowl the darkness of lonely nights; to dig and come up empty and not give up.

Then I wondered about the delicate tassels tied around the stick. Perhaps we need to hold this powerful stick of keen determination lightly. Like that lone coyote dancing among the trees, we need light-heartedness and joy along with disciplined work. The coyote finds balance, and so can we.

Handstand, bronze figure with found object, LH