"... a finicky and 'aristocratic' fruit compared to the apples he loved. 'The hired man gathers the apples and barrels them. The proprietor plucks the pears at odd hours for a pastime, and his daughter wraps them each in its paper,' he wrote. 'Judges & ex-judges & honorables are connoisseurs of pears & discourse of them at length between sessions.'… In his 1862 essay 'Wild Apples,' Thoreau describes an apple-picking walk through the Massachusetts countryside in November as a full sensory experience, in which the fruit can only be appreciated as part of the environment that produced it—as a way to taste late autumn. 'These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.' Wild apples, randomly cross-pollinated by bees, have a wide range of flavors, sometimes even when grown from the same tree, and a love for them requires a palate that can tolerate the occasionally sour, gnarled, irregular, intense. This is a kind of novelty that has been eradicated in our quest for endless choice. Thoreau himself predicted that 'The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past… I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!'"
(The illustration, from the NYRB article, is of a Belle Angevine pear from Fleury-sous-Meudon, Île-de-France, France, 1900.)
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49 comments:
Red Delicious aren't.
I do love how easy it is to get modern fruit varieties these days at the supermarket. For apples, I like Fuji (developed by Japanese researchers in the 1930s) and Honeycrisp (developed by American researchers in the 1960s). For citrus, I favour the dekopon (developed by Japanese researchers in the 1970s) when it is available. These aren't heirloom varieties. They're better. And there are a lot of them these days.
Pear varieties seem a bit older in general. Comice -- my favourite -- is from the 19th century. Perhaps the genetics are trickier.
Consistently, the more I have read of Thoreau the more I dislike him.
I now live where Thoreau would walk. He was right. Plenty of orchards but no wild apples.
pears are tasty!
The apples this year from my tree were amazing. They were like pumpkins, and sweet, but not too sweet; they have pink streaks in the flesh that makes pink applesauce that needs no sugar. The applesauce has "notes of rhubarb," I could go on an on.
The touching "Pear Scene" from the Godfather Part II.
"What a nice pear!"
Well, where there’s fruit imperialism, there’s surely fruit racism.
Honestly, has any ideology that has spent this much energy in frantic self-parody endured for this length of time? The downside of the American Postwar Cocoon, I guess.
Thoreau is so full of shit. How many people, even in 1862, had the time to wander over the countryside eating "Wild apples"? And what about the people who owned those "Wild" apples?
He's such a contrarian crank. I don't have the slightest doubt that if most people in 1862 had liked apples more than pears, Thoreau would've been writing about how great pears were.
Thoreau never contemplated the wonder of belly freight on a 747 aircraft. Blueberries from Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Chile--and occasionally even from California are in the grocery stores in Los Angeles.
London grocery stores have lots of prepared fruits and vegetables sold in plastic punnets. Produce brokers in London telephone or telex their orders to Kenya mid day. Workers in Nairobi (and environs) prepare the veggies, pack them in punnets, which in turn are packed into "coffins" and loaded onto air freighters. The prepared and prepackaged veggies arrive in London (or Manchester/Birmingham) around 0400 London time. The punnets are on the shelves in Sainsbury and other grocery stores by 0900 and in the hands of customers by late afternoon--and cooked and on the table by 2000.
It's true you can buy local produce in London grocery stores--but there's a lot of Kenyan veggies as well.
Different times, different methods.
There is no shortage of apple species ...
Over 7,500 cultivars of the culinary or eating apple (Malus domestica) are known. Some are extremely important economically as commercial products, though the vast majority are not suitable for mass production.
Wikipedia.
If Willa Glickmann wants to taste a few of the more obscure cultivars she will have to do as Thoreau did -- take a walk in the woods. Not even Whole Foods carries more than a few varieties.
I prefer pears.
I love pears. They're my favorite food. After they're out of season, it's back to the old apple-orange-banana routine until summer.
As bad as the food was in England, I also ate the best meals ever there at banquets. One followed the main course with a perfect, unblemished half pear. I don't know where they get fruit like that.
When my wife buys pears I groan, knowing that I will be the one to eat them after they've over-ripened and she's no longer interested in them.
Apples are for pies and pears are for Icecream.
pear > apple
The proof might be that he thought otherwise.
I concur there’s wild apple trees but few apples anymore. I do go to an orchard not far from Walden. The fresh picked Macintosh is the superior variety. Some macs and a couple cortlands make the best pies, excepting the antique varieties from my parent’s little gentlemans farm in northern VT. It’s been two years since I’ve tasted those, likely never again…
Whatever "cost" posited by the headline writer is more than offset by the benefits of people being able to get the fruits they want when they want to eat them.
Any "cost" requires one to think that Thoreau's asinine rant about apples vs. pears is in any way how people should think, especially 160 years later.
Also, any "cost" other than economic would have been considered decadent 160 years ago, and should be today, but isn't.
I’m glad that apples vs. pears didn’t lead to a shooting war in 1862. I guess they had more consequential differences to fight over at the time.
Used to have a nice walk past a....probably feral as opposed to wild--apple tree. Could grab one of the low-hanging fruit at season.
I usually carry a knife ,so I could dig out the worms and scrape off the blight/crud. Rub off the road dust onto my jeans.
Not bad. Somebody cut it down, presumably for sweet-scented firewood.
I survived--trying for a BG reference here--and likely will.
Is there a Thoreauvian word for "first-world problem"?
Used to have a nice walk past a....probably feral as opposed to wild--apple tree. Could grab one of the low-hanging fruit at season.
I usually carry a knife ,so I could dig out the worms and scrape off the blight/crud. Rub off the road dust onto my jeans.
Not bad. Somebody cut it down, presumably for sweet-scented firewood.
I survived and likely will.
Is there a Thoreauvian word for "first-world problem"?
Nebraska and Iowa have a fair number of apple orchards. Nebraska is the home of Arbor Day. I love apple cider.
Now is the time for winesaps. My brother hated them. Thought it was a funny name.
This reminds me about macintosh apples, when I was growing up in New England in the 70s. We would go to the orchard and they were so good! The perfect apple. Crisp, sweet, juicy, full apple flavor, just amazing. But over the decades I couldn’t find that again. I don’t even see macintosh in the stores, well granted I’m on the west coast now, but still macintosh apples somehow ended up terrible, mushy, tough skins, not much flavor. There’s much to be said about a good apple!
I ran a fruit-tree nursery in Québec for some 15 years, and published a book -- in both English and French editions -- on ecological fruit production. Stories of this type are quite tiring because they all sing the same song: Modern fruit is bad because, well, BECAUSE. Bullshit.
In my collection I have fruit production books going back to the early 19th C. Best known is Apples of New York (1904). Most of the apples described therein have disappeared from commerce -- and for good reason. They were lousy. Most were intended for hard cidre, but a few good ones persist, such as Wealthy, Baldwin, Rome, York, McIntosh, Cortland, and Russet.
Most modern fruit offers a notable improvement over predecessors, and it has entered commerce because people actually BUY it. The days of "an apple has to be red" are long gone, and I really hate it when people get all nostalgic about some former world they neither know or understannd.
At least he didn't complain that the pears had a texture like they had been dropped in sand.
Last post of the day- so it must be an open one.
Emergencies are- emergencies. You perform the emergency response, then it's over. Maye the house burned down, maybe you saved it.
But there's some trigger that says "Hey, the emergency is over." The cars are towed off the road. The ship sinks- or makes ashore. You bleed to death- or staunch the bleed and get repaired by a surgeon. Always, there's an end.
But not the dreaded covid. There is no definitive end. When do we stop vaccinating? Apparently- never- it must go on until EVERYONE is vaccinated. Even though getting vaccinated does no, emphatically- DOES NOT! keep people from getting the dreaded covid nor does it keep them from dying of it. When do we stop masking? When do we start? Why do we mask 2 year olds? (In NY by royal order of Dictator Hochul.) Apparently the dictators making these decisions does so by whim. And there are no rules, no way to tell when we're supposed to go back to normal.
Why? The simple answer is- it's about control, not about health. We're supposed to go to a new normal where we obey without question. I'm not ready to go there.
It’s hard to imagine a pear mania. Is that anything like a pear moral panic?
Pears are finicky. They’re as easily bruised as apples while the window of opportunity on sweetness and texture is narrower. And it’s not
like there’s a big pay-off. A good pear is about as enjoyable as a mediocre apple.
Is John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, currently in or out of favor? Is he a loveable folk hero or a greedy real estate developer this week?
Pears are seemingly always mushy and their "overripe mouth-feel" offends me.
I generally don't eat real overripe fruit of any kind (apples have got to be crisp) except for citrus which I judge from juice taste in each segment.
but still macintosh apples somehow ended up terrible, mushy, tough skins, not much flavor.
Macs are by far my favorite variety but they are precious and do not keep well. Most store bought Macs are as you say- mushy, mealy, lacking in tartness. Fresh from the orchard is best but techniques in cellaring and preserving their character have improved, so it is possible to find good ones out of season. Publix supermarket will bring great Macintosh to the south until at least Christmas.
Last year I made apple pies with them for the holiday…
Apples and pears make delicious cockney slang.
There is a certain joy in coming across wild fruit trees and berry bushes. Nature providing sustenance for your walk.
Pears? Yuk.
"The days of "an apple has to be red" are long gone, and I really hate it when people get all nostalgic about some former world they neither know or understannd."
I guess if you can get used to supermarket apples, they serve some purpose, like being available out of season and standing up to shipping long distances, but nothing beats a tree-ripened apple picked after there has been a frost. But like wild blueberries, it's impossible to serve a mass market year round with them, that doesn't mean they aren't better, or that if they could be shipped and stored, people wouldn't choose them first.
BTW, I picked all of the green tomatoes off of my plants before the frost, and they have ripened up nicely, and I am enjoying the last BLTs of the year right now. But they are not as perfect as the ones that you pick right at the first blush of ripeness and let ripen in the kitchen. I think it takes more hours of sunlight to vine ripen tomatoes than my garden gets around here after mid September.
effinayright said...
When my wife buys pears I groan, knowing that I will be the one to eat them after they've over-ripened and she's no longer interested in them.
Me too. Not pears so much, but several other items on the fruit and vegetable continuum.
And Bart Hall's comments last night are worthy of a couple thumbs-up.
Is John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, currently in or out of favor? Is he a loveable folk hero or a greedy real estate developer this week?
Most sweet apples are infertile hybrids, the fruit has seeds, but the seeds will not germinate. The majority of sweet apples are grown by a process that is effectively a form of cloning -- cuttings from the original hybrid are grafted to related rootstock and then planted in orchards close together so that pollination does not dilute the genome.
Wild apples are native to Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan particularly. The fruits of actual wild apples are virtually inedible. They contain tannins and alkaloids that make the fruit unpleasantly bitter and in a few cases mildly toxic. (This is the source of the green apples = belly aches folklore.) However, the several dozen wild species will cross-pollinate, occasionally producing a more palatable hybrid. Most of them are infertile and therefore subject to extinction. However, several fertile hybrid cultivars were known in ancient times, which explains the frequent appearance of the apple in Greco-Roman mythology. These ancient apples were still quite acerbic and not really suitable for eating raw, though baking or stewing improved their flavor. They were also used to make fermented beverages akin to what we call hard cider, and it was cider apple cultivars that European colonists introduced to the New World, and the trees planted by Jonathan Chapman were also cider varieties.
The long and the short of my comment is this, not unlike many other things he chose to opine about, Henry David Thoreau knew very little about the subject of apples or pears. He never tasted a wild apple because there were few to none in North America at the time to be tasted. In fact, it was wild apple species imported from Russia in the late 1800s that helped produce many of the sweet hybrids we enjoy today.
I highly recommend The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan for much more on the subject of apples, marijuana hemp, and tobacco -- our green masters that tempt us with sensual pleasure in order to control and exploit us.
Thoreau was a lying writer who actually lived off his mother and soaked her dry. Far from being alone, townspeople, who were about a mile away, had to feed and support him to take the pressure off his respectable mother, as he, Louisa May Alcott’s equally wayward father, and other dumbass “utopians” left their families in dangerous penury and pretended to have insights brought by isolation and proto-communism while grifting off people with real jobs.
They were the first hippies.
Not a compliment.
A ripe Royal Riviera pear from Harry & David in Medford, Oregon is truly a aristocratic pleasure, melt in your mouth deliciousness. One does have to be careful not too get too greedy as to ripeness.
This comment is prompted in part by Bart Hall's excellent paragraphs teaching us several truths about apples ...
How is it that commercial publications can make a profit publishing untruths as fact? Who buys this stuff and why? Should we blame it on a failure of the US educational systems -- public and private?
It's been said many times that when we read, see or hear a story in the "popular" press about a thing in which we have some knowledge or expertise, we know that it is just plain wrong. Yet "we" continue to patronize those sources and they are financially successful. ?!?
Ann: You're the expert. Help us out here.
Pears are hard to raise and easy to bruise.
Maybe that makes them the most human of all the fruits.
It was nice to have local guys -- Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott -- that everybody in the world talked about. It made one feel special.
Maybe that was part of my problem. But more about that later.
Lurker21 said...
Pears are hard to raise and easy to bruise.
BUT! isn't our happiness, 'the best gift anybody can give to their' fruit trees?
And eating tasty pears, makes me VERY happy
New England apple picking is good family fun. It's no wonder that Johnny Appleseed was born up Highway 2 from Walden in Leominster, Mass.
Pears are the best.
But a little too sweet to be eaten too often.
Pears are so much more sexy than apples.
There needs to be a greater understanding in the world that pleasures are not universal.
Some people love great music. It speaks to them. To others, it's background noise.
Same with food. We have cravings. We have a variety of taste buds. My daughter is capable of sensing spices in a way that I cannot (I tested this without her knowing).
I love coffee and will make an effort to grind them properly when I have beans. My wife drinks whatever is set in front of her.
The hidden subtext behind all articles like these is YMMV, and it's all right if you don't get it. Figure out what you like, and keep eating it.
I like apples, but I'll probably never go for a woodland walk in fall and taste one. I'll miss that, but I won't regret it.
Pears, however ...
I make a lot of apple pies at this time of year, and have rediscovered the perfection of a slice of pie for breakfast with strong coffee. It feels homey and...American. By contrast, a baked pear seems extravagant and fancy. I wouldn't think of eating a slice of pear tart for breakfast. With the slices arranged just so it seems as if it should be reserved to dessert only.
PS: A little Calvados added to your apple filling really kicks the flavor up nicely.
I'm a quince man, myself.
A little over twenty years ago I planted on my small city lot in Minneapolis, four apple trees, five cherry trees, two plum trees, two apricot trees, two pear trees and one peach tree. And each and every year I get a shit-ton of squirrels
"Red Delicious aren't."
Pink Ladies are my favorite. I could eat one everyday and never tire of them.
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