Apples, Apples Everwhere!
Butternut Apple Bisque & Sauce Normande (French Honey Mustard Apple Dressing)
Meat and Potatoes? Brie and Caviar? Tofu and Oats?
In whichever dietary category you fall - bet you love apples.
Truly a universal treat, apples are grown all around the world and have a history that dates back to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
Scientists agree to this extent. The origin of the apple (genus Malus) is somewhere in the Fertile Crescent; probably from the area between the Tigress and Euprahates rivers, believed by be the site of “the garden” in what is now Iraq.
Greek mythology features a similar story to that of the Bible. Gaia (Mother Earth) presents Zeus and Hera with a golden apple tree to commemorate their marriage. But, there is just one problem. The tree is guarded by Ladon - who is, you guessed it, a very unfriendly snake!
Apples are always bobbing up in stories, folklore and documented history. As far back as 8000 BC, groups of hunter/gatherers begin to trade with each other. Either deliberately or accidentally, different apple varieties result from these encounters. By 79 BC, Pliny the Elder describes 20 varieties of apples in his work, “Natural History”. Apples were being prescribed for maladies by 200 AD. Sweet apples were suggested as a digestive aid, and tart for curing fainting and constipation.
Alburtus Magnus of Cologne, Germany, naturalist, philosopher and bishop, determined that apples, and other cultivated foods, were developed from the wild (1240). Thus, upstaging Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” by centuries.
Sir Isaac Newton was inspired by a dropping apple - to ponder and discover the “law of gravity” in 1664. Some say it fell on his head!
Six years later, Tuscan Grand Duke Cosmo III threw a party with 56 different types of apples on the menu. Hope the guests weren’t sitting in the orchard. If so, they might have discovered the law of gravity the hard way.
In the USA, no one is more closely associated with apples than John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.
In the first part of the 19th century, Chapman, a young man, in his early twenties, began a journey that lasted a lifetime. With a bag of seeds purchased from a Pennsylvania cider mill, he headed out for the newly opened territory south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He would clear a likely spot for an orchard with his bare hands, plant seeds in neat rows and build a brush fence around them to keep out animals. It is said that he planted millions of seeds; a few trees still bearing fruit to this day!
Apples and archery came together in 1829, when Rossini’s fabulously successful opera, “Guillaume Tell” (William Tell) premiered in Paris. Based upon a Swiss story, William, an ace of an archer, is forced by the Austrian occupiers to shoot an apple off his young son’s head - or die. Luckily for the kid and opera aficionados, he doesn’t miss. Trivia fans - the William Tell overture was the theme song of the Long Ranger TV series (1950’s).
My personal favorite apple, one of the newest varieties, was first cultivated by Mary Ann Smith (Granny Smith), down under, in New South Wales. Born in 1868, daughter of transported convicts, Granny discovered the sapling tree in her yard.
The apple, which was probably a mutant of a French crabapple, soon found its way into her cooking pot, to the local market and then to the world. The Granny Smith is a very tart green apple, available year ’round, and is an all-purpose apple.
We all know the phrase, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”, spoken by J. T. Stinson, 1904 at the St. Louis Exposition. He was right on!
Fast forward to 2000. UC Davis discovers powerful new anti-oxidents in apples. 2 apples or 12 ounces of pure apple juice daily, significantly reduces the effects of LDL (lousy) cholesterol.
In addition, studies at various universities and clinics find apples are effective in the prevention of type II diabetes and asthma; may help impede heart disease and strokes; reduce risk of lung cancer by 20% and, the skin of apples inhibits colon cancer. WOW!
Double size it? No. How about “appleize” it.