Roger Yepsen's succinctly titled Apples is a compact little tome that functions much like a field guide to more than ninety varieties of apple found in the US and Canada, with an emphasis on the less common but not altogether obscure varieties. The book measures a scant 5"x6"; almost small enough to fit in a pocket. With brief entries and a hand painted color print accompanying each one, there's a lot of information packed into a small package.
The book begins with an apple primer, of sorts. Yepsen is clearly a devotee of this iconic fruit, and his prose betrays the deep admiration of a connoisseur. In his introduction Yepsen will tell you how to pick an apple, either at the supermarket, or the roadside stand, though not off the tree directly. He covers the rudiments of making cider hard or sweet, other methods of preserving the fruit, and of keeping a backyard apple "orchard." Needless to say, these subjects can and do fill books in their own right. If you want to seriously pursue any of these activities, you'll probably want to get one of those books. But Yepsen captures the highlights in astonishingly few words. Surprisingly, though he lists his favorite apple varieties for pie making, he doesn't provide a recipe.
Scanning through the entries of this book is an excellent way to acquire a vocabulary to talk about apples and apple trees. A guide to this "apple argot" is also included at the end of the book. I also learned a bit of history, including the fact that thousands of acres of apple orchards were razed to the ground by the fervor of the temperance movement and Prohibition. Oh, yes. The most popular alcoholic beverage of the American colonies wasn't beer, but hard apple cider. And it remained so until those untold thousands of apple trees fell to teetotalling folly.
Unless you are already an apple sophisticate, Apples will introduce you to many underappreciated varieties. Of course the Winesap, Braeburn, Gravenstein, and Jonagold are included. But so are such apples as Ashmead's Kernel, or the Hubbardston Nonesuch. Yepsen describes the latter as "a handsomely aging character actor among apples. There is a monumentality about the fruit." The typical entry includes a detailed description of the appearance and taste of the fruit, the history and lineage of the variety so far as it is known, the best use of the fruit (cider, baking, eating, sauce, etc.), a word or two on preferred or tolerated growing conditions, typical harvest time, and its storage tendencies. The hand painted illustrations of each variety are wonderfully detailed.
As a guide to identifying unknown varieties of the fruit, Apples can only help so much. There are over 250 varieties of apple still grown commercially in the US (most of them in very small quantities), down from a thousand known to have been sold in markets in the year 1900. Apples doesn't come close to covering even this paltry remainder. And although most apple trees are produced from scion wood (in essence, a form of cloning), they still don't always run true to type. We suspect the tree that came with our home is a Stayman, but our fruits don't exactly match either Yepsen's illustrations or known local Staymans. Still, that's our best guess based on all available information, and this book helped us with our research. I'm sure Yepsen would agree with me that the main point is that our old apple tree continues to bear, and the apples taste great.
Apples would be a great book for anyone interested in learning more about either apple trees or just the fruit itself, for whatever purpose. I've heard of scion swapping events, and this would certainly be the book to carry with you on such expeditions. It's also pleasant to flip through this book at random on a bone chilling winter night, while sipping some warmed cider from last year's harvest, as I am now. Highly recommended to any apple lover.
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