At home with Jackie
The joys of the first apples picked in the new year
January is when we pick the first apple of the year. Last January, this unfolded with a small boy racing up the stairs, yelling, “It came off in my hand, Grandma. Can I eat it?” He could, and he did, and we shared it. The first apple of the season should be celebrated.
Most years, our first apple is Early Blaze. One of its ancestors, Jonathan, is my favourite apple. It’s also the possums’ favourite. (Possums, sadly, have good taste in fruit and vegetables.) Like most commercially available apples, Jonathan doesn’t ripen until the end of February. Early Blaze, on the other hand, ripens in the first week of January, or even December in a climate warmer than ours.
Early Blaze is crisp and sweet, with a hint of tartness. It can be kept in the fruit bowl for a week and still have excellent taste and texture, unlike most early apples, which turn floury within days of picking.
For decades, I thought Gravenstein apples had the taste and texture of cottonwool lightly flavoured with kerosene, until I accidentally planted six of them. (They were labelled Jonathan. Sigh.) But I’m glad to have this old German variety. The apples mature here in the last two weeks of January, and eaten fresh from the tree, they are delicious (not Delicious, which matures in late February).
If you can’t eat all your Gravensteins within a few days of picking, they make excellent stewed apple for apple crumble – especially the way I make it, with a lot of apple and a scatter of crumble. They are slightly tasteless stewed, so
I add a clove or two during cooking.
Beauty of Bath is a classic, old, early-maturing variety from Bath, in England. Eaten straight from the tree, it’s crisp and fragrant, but left even a day after picking, it’s “the chooks will eat it”. Often, we don’t bother picking the fruit, as it’s nowhere near as good as Early Blaze, but the bowerbirds enjoy it.
My favourite early apple to cook is Lodi… I think. One of the heritage nurseries where we bought many of our 124 apple varieties was not good with labelling. The fruit seem like Lodi, though. They mature in January, and have pale green skin and extraordinary bright white flesh. Lodis are okay raw, but brilliant cooked. They also make excellent cricket balls, or ‘sticks’ for the dog.
Don’t expect to buy early apple varieties, except for Gravenstein, at your local garden centre, as most customers want fruit that keeps. There are excellent suppliers of rare apples online, or you could ask an apple grower at a farmers’ market if they’ll sell you a cutting to graft onto an existing tree. Other early varieties that are well worth growing include Abas, Summer Strawberry and Tydeman’s Early.
Just remember to eat your early apples straight from the tree, or stew them with a clove or two, and freeze the excess. And give thanks. For as much as I love peaches, apricots and cherries, the apple is still the king of fruits, and the first one of the season is to be cherished.