The Fleeting Joys of Apple Season

That sweet, aromatic, not-too-hot-and-not-too-cool time that is Apple Season has come and gone here in the Carolina Piedmont, and I miss it already. The days of picking, crunching and baking our hearts out always seem to go by much too quickly. But perhaps that makes them all the sweeter while they last. Often just as sweet as the apples themselves is the experience of trekking through a local orchard with my husband and daughters to find the crispiest, juiciest ones.

Papa adorns his apple sprites
with Morning Glory blossoms.

This year we visited Carrigan Farms in Mooresville, NC to do our picking. It was a perfect day for it--bright, crisp and dry. We picked so many we had a hard time carrying them back to the car! There are many other great places to pick apples in North Carolina, especially in the western mountains. In fact, apples are grown in all 50 U.S. states, and grown commercially in 36 states. If you'd like to learn where you can find locally grown apples in or near your own community, visit www.pickyourown.org. (This website lists pick-your-own farms for apples and many other kinds of produce throughout U.S. and in a number of other countries as well.)

Not only are apples a delicious, inexpensive, and convenient food, they are also packed with healthy nutrients. While many of us grew up hearing that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," Kerri-Ann Jennings points out in this Huffington Post article that these days,

apples are so commonplace that they're almost overlooked and pushed aside by flashier superfruits, such as pomegranates and goji berries.

But apples truly are a superfood themselves. Among the many benefits they offer are:

• Bone protection
• Asthma relief
• Weight control
• Immunity enhancement
• Cholesterol control
• Alzheimer's protection
• Parkinson's protection
• Cancer protection (lung, breast, colon and liver)
• Diabetes management
• Dental health
• Gallstone prevention
• Digestive health
• Hemorrhoid prevention
• Liver detoxification

It makes sense, then, that humans have enjoyed and celebrated apples for many generations. Cultivated for over 4,000 years, apples have often played a prominent role in festive occasions as well as in everyday life. The ancient Greeks used apples both ceremoniously (e.g., in weddings) and medicinally. Hippocrates, known as "the father of medicine," reportedly said, “Let your food be your medicine and let your medicine be your food.” As Anna Lovett-Brown points out in her essay on the history of apples, "his most favored prescriptions for his patients included apples, dates and barley mush." The Romans also celebrated this nutritious and tasty fruit. Through cross-breeding and grafting, they developed its sweetness and increased its size, and spread it throughout Europe. They considered the apple a symbol of love and fertility, and fêted Pomona, the goddess of the orchards, during this season of the year (on November 1). Apples also featured prominently in Samhain, the Celt's autumnal harvest celebration.

Apples are not native to North America (with the exception of the sour crabapple), but were brought here by the earliest European settlers and soon embraced by Native Americans, who cultivated many new varieties. By the mid-seventeenth century, apple orchards were spreading rapidly. Today, the U.S. is the second leading producer of apples in the world.

In continuing our own family's tradition of picking apples together each fall, then, we are following a long, culturally diverse line of predecessors. So what have we done with all those apples we picked? After my comedy-of-errors attempt to make a year's supply of applesauce a couple of apple-picking seasons ago, I foreswore ever trying that again. Instead, we've made sauteed apples with biscuits, apple turnovers, apple pancakes, and an "Apple Crisp Pie" I'd never tried before (pictured below). If you'd like to try it, you can find the recipe here. We also hope to make apple muffins and, of course, Aunt Tootie's Apple Cake (see my post from Friday, November 18, 2011). Mmmm mmmm.

I hope you get to enjoy some local apples and other autumn harvests this fall. There really is so very much to savor and be thankful for this time of year. All hail Pomona! 

After Apple-Picking

by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Intimations of Autumn

It was that certain something, that particular breath in the breeze that I didn’t quite notice at first. Or was it a scent? Or a flash of color in the tree branch by the kitchen window? Somehow the world has whispered in my ear during these first few days of September that autumn is on its way. And I can’t help but be glad.

Why is it that the first signs of autumn—the season that will hearken in the bitter winds of winter—feel so warm and cozy? When I was a little girl, my siblings and I knew fall was on its way when we walked out of evening services at our little church and smelled smoke wafting from my grandparents’ fireplace a block away. The weather might still be warm enough for us to break a sweat during the 3-minute trek to their doorstep, but no matter—we knew autumn was coming. It was a good feeling, a comforting feeling. However much we might have enjoyed the past few weeks of swimming in Cherokee Lake, playing softball, sucking on popsicles, fishing in Wolfe’s pond, or running through the sprinkler in our yard, we celebrated that precursory smoke and the calmer, quieter, cozier adventures it would usher in: hikes in the woods, evening hay rides, pumpkin carving, leaf collecting, cider sipping.

No, I’m not ready to start choosing Halloween costumes or baking pumpkin pies just yet, but my girls and I can’t wait to go apple picking; to hear the local marching bands begin their drills; to visit a nearby county fair; and to celebrate the autumnal equinox (September 22 this year).

So come on in, autumn, and pull up a chair. We’ll share stories from when you’ve visited before, and you’ll help us cook up some new ones that will bring comfort and warmth in years to come.

Heirloom Apple Cake

A few weeks ago I went to the cupboard, pulled out the battered notebook of recipes my mom gave me some years ago, and hungrily flipped right to the one recipe I have to make every fall: my Great Aunt Tootie's Apple Cake. Aunt Tootie used to bring it to our family gatherings this time of year, and now that she has passed away and can't share it with us anymore, my mom and I seem to have taken it upon ourselves to make sharing it with others an essential part of the autumn season. (Of course, you'll be luckiest if you get a piece from one of my mom's cakes, but I like to think mine are getting a little closer to real good each year.) So far this season I've made four apple cakes--to share with the folks working on our barn, with my husband and his coworkers, with my stepson who came for a visit, and with various others who have dropped by our house at the right moment. My mom has probably made at least half a dozen apple cakes by this time.

This cake seems to taste extra sweet when it is baked with apples we've picked ourselves at a local apple orchard. Having moved from Ohio earlier this year, we almost missed the 2011 North Carolina apple season: by the time I started thinking the harvest might be ready, the picking was almost done! But we did make it in time to an orchard about an hour north of Charlotte, where (as always) we went right past the trees near the front of the field and headed straight for the last apple trees in the rows. The Granny Smiths (my favorite) were already "done," but there were still come Golden Russets and several lovely varieties of red. We ended up (again, as always) leaving the field with much more fruit than we could comfortably carry. But that's one of the joys of harvest time, isn't it? Being loaded down so heavily that your muscles ache even as your mouth waters.

I've since made apple turnovers, fried apples, apple sundaes, and apple crisp. But nothing compares to Aunt Tootie's Apple Cake. As you can see from the recipe below, it is a not a complicated concoction--no spices, no fancy baking techniques. Just one big bowl, a sturdy spoon, and simple ingredients. Maybe it is that simplicity that allows it to so deliciously showcase our sweetest fruit of the fall season. Enjoy!


AUNT TOOTIE'S APPLE CAKE
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Blend together:

• 3 eggs
• 1 1/4 cup oil (I sometimes use up to 1/2 cup applesauce, and you could use more or less.)
• 2 cups sugar.

Add and mix in well:

• 2 1/2 cups self-rising flour.

Stir in:

• 2-4 medium apples, chopped (I always err on the side of more apples; use your own judgment.)
• 1 cup coconut
• 1 cup chopped nuts (My mom uses walnuts; I use pecans.)

Pour into a greased and floured bundt pan (or, if you don't have one, a tube pan). Bake for 1 hour. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan and then invert onto a cooling rack.
After the cake has cooled completely, drizzle over it the following Caramel Topping.

Caramel Topping
Heat in a medium saucepan, stirring constantly:

• 1/2 stick butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup evaporated milk. 

Bring this mixture to a boil and (still stirring constantly) let boil for 3-5 minutes. How long you boil it will depend on how thick you like the topping to be. I think Aunt Tootie boiled hers to the soft ball stage (test by dropping a bit from the spoon into ice water and check to see if it forms a easily pliable ball). My mom makes hers thicker and spreads it on the cake instead of drizzling it. I shoot for somewhere in between.