Apples : The Apple Connoisseurs

From about 1850 to 1950 there flourished in Britain a school of fruit connoisseurs whose enthusiasm and discrimination flowered in some really juicy and aromatic prose. They wrote about apple varieties in the rhapsodic style that would normally be reserved for describing fine wines.

Listen to Morton Shand explaining his father’s final preference for Ashmead’s Kernel (after 50 years’ loyalty to Ribston, Bienheim, Cox and Tasmanian Sturmer Pippins):

“It was his considered opinion that Ashmead’s Kernel was just perceptibly superior to any of those august four. What an apple; what suavity of aroma! Its initial Madeira-like mellowness of flavour overlies a deeper honeyed nuttiness; crisply sweet, not sugar-sweet but the succulence of a well-devilled marrow-bone. Surely no apple of greater distinction or more perfect balance can ever have been raised anywhere on Earth.”

Eloquent words; and they came, significantly, from a man who was well-versed in the making and appreciation of wine and who had a French wife (who, he said, had transformed him from “a bundle of cantankerous bones into a bushel of contented fat”).

These were the days when the English were famous for ending dinner with Port and dessert. The custom (never, of course, universal; it was an upper-class phenomenon) still survives in some clubs and in colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, but it really belongs to late Victorian and Edwardian times. The feats of Victorian gardeners at the great country houses, whose orchards and hot-houses yielded fruits of astonishing perfection, combined with the inspiring effect of the Port to produce a unique breed of reflective connoisseurs, all male (“the ladies” having left the dinner table earlier) and most of them with a classical education and a literary bent.

What happened at the upper end of the social scale had its echoes lower down. When Dickens portrayed Scrooge walking through a fruit and vegetable market, he alluded to the “blooming pyramids” of apples and pears and singled out some special English apples for comment:

“There were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.”

Many of these varieties are rare today, and there is a great nostalgia for them in England. Let it be clear, however, that the scientific reasons for preserving old varieties of fruits don’t really have anything to do with “honeyed nuttiness” or anything of that sort. Just about any old variety is worth preserving because it may have a potentially useful characteristic, such as resistance to a pest or blight that may become a problem in the future. If it is preserved, at an establishment such as Brogdale Orchards in the English County of Kent (which has more than 2,000 varieties growing), or corresponding institutions in France and the United States, its genes will be available, should they be wanted.

But the ordinary person does not see things that way; we dream of and mourn the “lost” apples that were fabulously good to eat, umpteen times more delicious than the “Delicious” apples on supermarket shelves. And I believe that all this dreaming and mourning owes its existence in some measure to the rhapsodical writing of Morton Shand and his predecessors.

Chief among the predecessors stands Edward Bunyard, a member of a famous family of nurserymen, who flourished as a writer in the ‘20s and ‘30s. “The Anatomy of Dessert” (1929) retains the standing that it immediately achieved as the most purple prose available on the subject. We may smile at some of his conceits: Does it really make sense to identify King of the Pippins as an apple for the morning rather than the afternoon? And when he remarks, while defining the occasions when a Cox can be eaten, that “a little Mendelssohn goes a long way,” are we to take the analogy seriously?

I would answer yes. Allusive and ethereal he may be, but what he wrote was founded on an unrivaled experience of growing and eating apples (not to mention the other fruits dealt with in his book). Take this passage:

“Of Ribston Pippin it does not seem necessary to write at length, as even our novelists can spell it and place it in its right season. We often hear that it is dying out or that it is not so good as it was. To the last allegation the reply is, it never was. This invaluable fruit is often starved for water and thus becomes dry and flavourless, and still more frequently is left too long in store. . . . Some of the best Ribstons I have tasted came from a tree standing by an Oxford river, in which its roots extended for some distance and thus ensured the needful water supply.”

Note his dismissal of the romantic view that everything was better “in the old days” and his measured choice of words (“some of the best” rather than “the best ever”). Bunyard has had a lasting effect on our thinking about apples--even among people who have never read a word he wrote--because his rhapsodies had a solid basis in both the orchard and the dining room.

Now, in the 1990s, it is good to think that the tradition of fine writing about fruits is being carried on, and by women too. Bunyard had been joined by his sister Lorna when he came to write his analysis (definitely not suitable for quotation to American readers) of the excellence of English apple pie; but it was a case of “Edward and Lorna,” not “Lorna and Edward.” Nowadays, however, it is two women, Dr. Joan Morgan and Francesca Greenoak, who are acclaimed as the monarchs of English pomology.

Yet the best article on apples for many a year came recently from the pen of Edward Behr in Vermont. This essay (published in his newsletter, “The Art of Eating”) is a useful reminder to Europeans that, contrary to the vulgar opinion, American appreciation of apples is keen.

Not so long ago, I and my wife were asked to lunch by a food historian in Concord, Mass. What would we like to eat? “As great a range of apples as you can muster,” said I, supposing that there would be three or four. There turned out to be 11, plucked from roadside stalls within the space of an hour. Better than we could do on our home ground in the south of England.

Davidson’s most recent book, “A Kipper With My Tea,” is available from North Point Press.