Not sure where to post this -- maybe Cooking and Baking, maybe here ? (Apples) {fixed a link} [View all]

[eppur_se_muova]

Last edited Wed Sep 30, 2020, 04:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples

From the sweet to the offbeat.
by Anne Ewbank January 6, 2020

Inside a bright Brooklyn gallery that is plastered in photographs of apples, William Mullan is being besieged with questions.

A writer is researching apples for his novel set in post-World War II New York. An employee of a fruit-delivery company, who covetously eyes the round table on which Mullan has artfully arranged apples, asks where to buy his artwork.

But these aren’t your Granny Smith’s apples. A handful of Knobbed Russets slumping on the table resemble rotting masses. Despite their brown, wrinkly folds, they’re ripe, with clean white interiors. Another, the small Roberts Crab, when sliced by Mullan through the middle to show its vermillion flesh, looks less like an apple than a Bing cherry. The entire lineup consists of apples assembled by Mullan, who, by publishing his fruit photographs in a book and on Instagram, is putting the glorious diversity of apples in the limelight.



Mullan, whose day job is as a brand manager for Raaka Chocolate, can rhapsodize about apples at length. He notes that the api etoile, an apple of Swiss or French origin that grows into a rounded star shape, is hard to find, with the trees he’s seen bearing fruit little and lately. He likens them to Pokémon. “You’re really lucky if you catch it,” he says with a laugh.



But he quickly sobers. “It’s a shame because they’re really cute, they’re really delicious.” Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease.



***
more: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/unusual-apples
https://www.instagram.com/pomme_queen/ (photo gallery)

I'm especially fascinated by the Black Oxford, since it might be cross-bred with the Arkansas Black. The Arkansas Black faded from production after a wave of parasites killed much of the crop. Perhaps a hybrid could prove more resistant, and still a late fruiter like the AB. With advancing climate change, a strain that ripens in November might grow pretty far north !

ETA: cut-&-paste errors in links