Aples
Malus
spp.Rosaceae familyThroughout North America in zones 4–8
It’s late and dark.
You are leaving your favorite bar and as you exit, you notice for the first time that there’s an apple tree across the street, and it has dropped apples all over the ground. You scramble around for a few minutes, examining apples under the streetlight for bruises and shoving the good ones into your purse.Dear reader, I was that after-hours scrumper, at work under the cloak of the evening.
Scrumping
is an evocatively dated English term for sneaking apples from an orchard. An article in the
Cheshire Observer
in 1887 described it as “[breaking] (in intent only, of course) the tenth com-mandment into small bits and fragments.” Those guilty of this petty crime generally never lifted prime specimens, and never in large quantities—the word itself is a derivative of
scrump
, meaning “an undersized or shriveled apple.”Perpetrators were likely children playing out of doors, shiftless drifters, and aspiring Romantic poets. Dorothy did it in
The Wizard of Oz
. Could there be a more wholesome image of thievery than teenage Judy Garland in pigtails and a gingham pinafore? The tree she plucked an apple from came alive and smacked her, but no worry: Outside of Oz, apple trees will be happy to release their fruit to you.
34 | the fruit forager's companion
There is no fruit better suited to casual five-finger discounts than the apple. One quick snatch and the entire package is secured. It holds up well in a pocket or backpack. Most import-ant, apples grow all over: neighborhoods, farmland, orchards. A resident of a developed suburb is just as likely to come across an apple tree as a person out in the sticks. A small apple is an ideal snack on the fly, and three can be a meal for those who are desperate or easily satisfied.But scrumping can only get one so far. In late 2007 Linda Bishop, a woman in her early fifties diagnosed as having bipolar disorder with psychosis, wandered for a few days before breaking into a vacant house on an apple orchard after being discharged from New Hampshire Hospital. She lived there for over three months, sustaining herself only on apples. Her cache ran out in December, and she died, weak and starved, less than a month later. The apples had been her savior on the one hand and an agent of her undoing on the other, though ulti-mately it was the delusions of her illness that led to her demise.Even in Bishop’s self-imposed isolation, the apples were a whiff of connectivity. The trees belonged to someone else; she took what the trees gave and put it to use. The apples were living things linking the two parties. Ideally, that is what apples trees are about: commu-nity. The results of this collaboration were quietly tragic in Bishop’s case, but in almost all others they are vital and dynamic. Apple trees are social trees.The global society of apple trees is impossibly diverse. In his seven- volume encyclopedia
The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada
, apple chronicler Dan Bussey lists seventeen thou-sand varieties planted here between 1623 and 2000. And that’s only one continent. Going beyond that, every apple seed is genetically dis-tinct from its parents. You can’t plant a Golden Delicious seed and count on getting Golden Delicious apples from the tree that springs up. Without grafting—inserting the cutting of a chosen tree into the rootstock of another young tree—there would be apple anarchy.
apples | 35
The majority of older American apple varieties were bred for making into other things: cider, baked desserts, applesauce. They needed to withstand months of storage and be naturally resistant to pests—attributes like high tannins or acidity and thick skins were favorable, and looks were secondary. Today appearances are top prior-ity with the comparatively small sector of varieties we see in the grocery store, where our eyes make decisions before our brains do.Even if a neighborhood tree produces one of the ubiquitous apples in the narrow produce aisle lexicon—Golden Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith—it may look nothing like what you’d get in the store. Commu-nity apples are often spotty and knobby on the surface, and they may be smaller or larger than we’re accustomed to seeing. Their skins can be mottled with black spots and the pinhole entry/exit marks of worms. These apples need someone to celebrate these attributes. They need you.The autumn fallen fruit bonanza of apple trees brings us scrumpers out of hiding. It is when our craft takes on an angelic air and becomes gleaning, not stealing. We work alone or in groups, ringing doorbells and calling orchards for permission to collect what’s been left behind. We crank cider mills and work our hands sore sliding paring knives between the leathery skin and crisp flesh. We bake and freeze. In Appalachia families get together for the weekend to make gallons and gallons of apple butter, an old but fading tradition. Smaller batches made in slow cookers have eclipsed huge ones in kettles suspended over wood fires, but as in many for-midable fruit undertakings, the work of many hands lightens the load and makes it a party.Apple trees can live a long time, and many a walker of remote areas has stumbled across a ghost orchard—grids of gnarled trees that have endured in their neglect, sometimes producing fruit and some-times not. A movement of avid cider makers and fruit growers has formed around locating nearly extinct apple varieties, a nitty-gritty effort to rediscover apples that offer flavors our collective tastes have thrown over for something more straightforward. They call them-selves fruit explorers, and they keep their eyes out for ghost orchards and backyard trees that give off a mystique. Their obsession with a forgotten past is a grassroots vision of the apple’s future.An apple tree has a magnetic pull. I like to think someone planted it because they hoped other people would find it. Don’t fight that pull. Walk the tightrope between scrumping and gleaning, and discover that keeping your balance comes naturally.