idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????
'whats your favorite apple' 'red' 'no i mean like what type' '??????' actual conversatiom i've had with a mutual from usa
THIRTY TWO??????
Listen that doesn’t even account for all the weird shit local farmers are getting up to.
May I present the best apple:
the world is so big and beautiful
There are literally thousands of apple varieties in the world! This is because apples are one of those fruits that don’t breed true, so every seedling apple is genetically distinct from its parent trees. Sometimes this means the fruit is inedible, or just boring, and sometimes you get something delicious, like Hauer Pippin or Bramley (which, as I understand it, is England’s premier cooking apple.) All the apple varieties that people want to keep are propagated by grafting: taking twigs or buds (scionwood) from the tree you want to propagate and attaching it to an existing tree or to rootstock (a rooted baby tree, either of a known variety with desirable traits like disease resistance, or an unknown seedling tree.)
The reason Americans are Like That about apples is because of supermarket food chains that value shelf life above all else, and also like. The Washington state apple-growing monopoly. (Do I resent Washington because their disgusting Red Delicious apples put my local apple farms out of business? Yes, yes I do.)
Anyway. Fellow Americans! Free yourself from the tyranny of apples that taste like wet cardboard - or wet, lemony styrofoam wrapped in plastic (I’m looking at you, Cosmic Crisp) and discover the beauty and weirdness of apples!
At the risk of unlocking another unskippable cut-scene, prev, how long have we been grafting? Is figuring that out what made apples a viable food thing for our predecessors?
Good question! Wikipedia says there are references to grafting in the New Testament, in a 6th century Chinese treatise on agriculture, and earliest of all, in a Greek text from 424 BCE, in which it is implied that people had been grafting for hundreds of years already.
I know that apples were in common cultivation during Roman times (there’s a small, late-hanging apple called the Lady Apple that is supposedly a Roman cultivar, though whether that is to be believed is in some debate.) I would guess that rooting cutting might have come before grafting - a lot of plants can be propagated by laying a branch down on the dirt and holding in there with a rock until it grows roots, at which point you can cut the newly rooted plant off from the mother plant.
I would love to know more about the origins of apple cultivation, but my wild guess would be that before grafting or rooting they were probably more like a foraging crop - but since apple trees can live for a hundred years or more, people would probably have a very good idea of where to go to find reliable crops of edible fruit, even if they weren’t growing apple trees in orchards.
Also, even “spitters”, as apple foragers like to call apples that are so bitter and tannic you take a bite and immediately spit it out, have culinary uses. There are carefully cultivated bitter apples used in traditional ciders and brandy to give depth of flavor to the finished product. (And I can tell you from experience that cider and appplejack made from just sweet apples is ssssssoooooo boring, omg.)
