Down here, sharing a border with the Sunshine State, we know all about oranges. Early settlers on St. Simons Island planted vineyards and fruit trees, including oranges and peaches. Today, Seville oranges still grow on the trees at Fort Frederica and citrus trees grace the gardens of many island residents. But with the arrival of fall, our thoughts turn to apples and pumpkins as the fresh picks of the season. So, in the spirit of autumn and crisp, cooler days, let’s take a closer look at everything apple.
Where do they come from? New York City may be known as the “Big Apple,” but it’s Washington state that produces the most apples every year, far surpassing New York and Michigan, the nation’s next top producers. In Georgia, we have apple country too, and the heart of it is Ellijay, in the North Georgia mountains. In fact, Ellijay is hosting the 46th annual Georgia Apple Festival October 14-15 and 21-22 this year if you’re looking for a fun—and fruit-filled—fall getaway!
But back to the “Big Apple,” for a minute; did New York earn that nickname for the state’s abundant apples? Not according to historical fact. Oddly, the term was first heard on the horseracing circuit. As the story goes, sometime around 1920, NYC newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, who covered the track on his beat, heard African-American stable hands in New Orleans say they were going to “the big apple,” a reference to New York City, whose race tracks were considered big-time venues. Fitz Gerald adopted the moniker in his news columns. Jazz musicians used the same nickname for the city to refer to its big-time music clubs in the1930s. The moniker faded from use until its revival as a part of a tourism campaign
in the early 1970s to polish up New York City’s image. The man credited with creating the ad campaign, Charles Gillett, president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, was a jazz enthusiast who knew that the Big Apple had once been a term that bestowing respect on the city. Visitors were invited to come take a bite out of the Big Apple and t-shirts, pins, and other promotional items featuring apples were seen everywhere. This time the nickname stuck. An ironic bit of trivia: long before “Big Apple” was coined, New York City was known as New Orange. In 1673, the Dutch captured New York from the English and dubbed it New Orange in honor of William III of Orange. When the city reverted to English control the following year, it reclaimed its former name. Apples and oranges indeed.
When looking at United States fruit production, the domesticated apple is the second most valuable fruit grown here, second only to the orange. Yet it is the apple has certainly become an embedded part of American culture: “as American as apple pie.” Even Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the apple the “America Fruit.” But where did apples originate?
The Garden of Eden, you might say if you take biblical lore at face value. After all, didn’t God warn Adam and Eve about the tree with the forbidden fruit? And wasn’t it an apple from that tree that Eve offered to Adam, thus causing their expulsion from this paradise? That’s what Milton described in Paradise Lost. But scholars will tell you that the apple got a bad rap. The forbidden fruit was never identified as an apple in the Hebrew Bible. What was more likely a fig, pear, peach, or maybe even a pomegranate, became an apple in common lore thanks to a Latin pun from a translator with a sense of humor, the popularity of Milton’s poem, and famous works of art dating back to the 1500s that depict Adam and Eve with an apple tree. (Michelangelo didn’t bite on the apple hype, his Sistine Chapel fresco pictures the serpent in the garden coiled around a fig tree.)
Research has shown that what we now know today as the domesticated sweet apple likely originated in China. Early evolution and spread of apple trees most likely happened via birds, and large herbivores like horses and bears. Humans later spread the fruit from China to Rome to Northern Europe both intentionally through the grafting of trees to create orchards and unintentionally from the consumption of the fruit and subsequent dispersal of seeds. European settlers brought the apple to America, but the many of the grafted European cultivars did not fare well. When planted however, the apple adapted to its surroundings, began to thrive.
In colonial times, apples became an important food source. They were likely a main source of sweetness as sugar and honey were not widely available in the colonies. Additionally, dried apples retained the fruit’s nutritional value and were easily stored. They became a valuable export. But it was apples’ use for cider that accelerated the spread of orchards. And it’s here that the American folklore figure of Johnny Appleseed arose.
John Chapman Johnny Appleseed grave marker
Walt Disney secured a place in pop culture for Johnny Appleseed, a barefoot rambler who wore a cooking pan as a hat and joyfully spread apple seeds from his knapsack along his travels. Yet, John Chapman (1774-1845), the pioneer nurseryman behind this cartoon icon was also a shrewd businessman. He helped make North America a testing ground for seeding selection by establishing nurseries up and down the Ohio River Valley, planting apple seeds gathered from cider mill discards ahead of early settlements. He then hired locals as caretakers for the nurseries and offered them profit shares in the venture. The two to three-year old seedlings from Chapman’s nurseries were perfect to comply with land grant requirements for planting fruit trees or growing apples for cider production. For Europeans and early American colonists, cider of both hard and soft varieties was an important beverage. Not only does unpasteurized cider provide vitamin C, vitamin B12 is created in the fermentation process. And where water sources may be unreliable the fact that the alcohol and tannins in cider stop bacterial growth, makes it even more useful. No careful propagation was needed to create apples needed for cider, random apple trees produced from seed were perfectly suitable. Since seeds survive the production process, Chapman could also take advantage of this to continue replenishing his stock. Ironically, our folk hero’s practice of planting apple seeds that resulted in trees with only a small chance of producing edible apples was counter to a national trend in which orchards were increasingly established using grafted varieties to ensure good eating apples. With an influx of new and more delicious varieties of apples, American ingenuity struck again and the invention of the apple parer soon followed!
While we’re separating fact from fiction and folklore when it comes to apples, how about Isaac
Newton and that falling apple? The manner in which Newton was struck by inspiration about the theory of gravity is one of the most famous science anecdotes of all time. A young Newton was sitting in his garden at home when an apple fell on his head, thus providing him with a stroke of brilliant insight that became his theory of gravity. Embellishment, both by Newton and the generations of storytellers who came after him, is almost definitely certain. But it appears from an original manuscript made available in digital form by The Royal Society in London, there is a first-hand account of how Newton devised his theory of gravity after witnessing an apple falling from a tree in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire. There is no evidence therein to suggest that it hit him on the head, however. Newton himself never left any written accounts of his encounter with the apple, but we do know that the year it occurred was 1666 and Newton was at Woolsthorpe Manor, where he had been born, as an outbreak of plague had closed many public buildings and had forced him from Cambridge. At university, Newton was particularly fascinated by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and eventually reasoned that the influence of gravity must extend over vast distances. After observing that apples always fall straight to the ground, he spent numerous years applying himself to the mathematics showing that the force of gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance.
Since no writings from Newton exist recounting his take, historians point to an account written by one of Newton's younger contemporaries, an antiquarian named William Stukeley, who also wrote the first biography of Britain's great scientist, entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life. A fellow Lincolnshire native, Stukeley spent much time in conversation with the older man, and the pair met regularly as fellows of the Royal Society, and often talked together. Stukeley described the apple anecdote as he was told it in 1726, when he and Newton spent the evening dining in London. There are other accounts that Newton shared with others some 50 years after the incident. "Newton cleverly honed this anecdote over time," said Keith Moore, head of archives at the Royal Society. "The story was certainly true, but let's say it got better with the telling." According to Moore, the story of the apple fit with the idea of an Earth-shaped object being attracted to the Earth and also had a resonance with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, which would be in keeping with Newton’s religious views. Perhaps more important evidence that the story of the falling apple, even if embellished, actually occurred is the fact that the same apple tree (a cooking variety known as Flower of Kent) still grows in sight of Newton’s bedroom window at the front of the house at Woolsthorpe Manor. Eureka indeed!
How about Granny Smith? Who was she anyway?
Granny Smith was in fact a real person, but she didn’t hail from Washington or New York or any other American apple-growing state. Not even close. Maria Ann “Granny” Smith and the
green apple named for her can be tracked to a small farm outside of Sydney, Australia, in Ryde, New South Wales. Maria was not a native Australian, however, she was born in Sussex, England in 1799 and married a farmer named Thomas Smith when she was 19 years-old. In 1838, the Smiths with their five children, and along with several other area families, left their farm in the village of Beckley to start a new life in Australia. At that time, the government was offering £25 a year to anyone willing to work the newly settled land “down under.” The couple put down roots in Kissing Point, known today as Ryde, and in the mid-1850s, they bought 24 acres of their own land, which was perfect for fruit cultivation.
The Smiths, like other local families at the time, grew apricots, pears, apples and other fruit. Maria baked pies to sell at the Sydney market, where she would frequently select different varieties to incorporate into her recipes. According to a report by local historian Hubert Rumsey in a 1924 issue of Farmer and Settler, in 1868 Maria asked a neighbor and his 12-year-old son to come over and look at some new seedlings that had sprouted down by the creek where she threw her compost. Smith told the neighbor and his son, who would become the source for Rumsey’s article more than 50 years later, that she believed the sweet green apples from the seedlings had derived from French crabapples grown in Tasmania. Smith cultivated the seedlings, but, sadly, died two years later at the age of 70.
Luckily for the apple lovers of today, a number of local growers had planted Maria’s seedlings
on their property. One of them, Edward Gallard, grew a large crop every year until his death in 1914. In 1891, the growers exhibited “Smith’s seedling,” at the Castle Hill Agricultural and Horticultural Show, where it took top honors in the cooking apple category. For years after that, growers exhibited the apples under the name “Granny Smith’s.” By 1895, the Australian government was growing Granny Smith apples in bulk and selling them on the export market. With its long shelf life and tart flavor, the Granny Smith apple took off after World War I, and by 1935 had reached markets in England. They didn’t arrive in the United States until 1972, but are now among the most popular apple varieties nationwide. Even though “Granny” Maria Ann Smith wasn’t directly responsible for the worldwide popularity her apple received, her original tree is still critical to the cultivation process. Because this beloved green apple came from a unique mutation that took place down by Smith’s creek, cuttings derived from that original tree are required to grow every Granny Smith apple.
But apples haven’t always had such a rosy history. In the 19th Century, the American temperance movement went after hard cider and applejack and many farmers cut down their apple trees. Fortunately, some advocates recommended fruits, vegetables, and nuts as being part of temperance as healthy alternatives to alcohol. When Americans began to see diet as key to not only physical, but moral health as well, a “health food movement” began, and the apple industry launched a public relations campaign to boost the apple’s healthy image. It was J.T. Stinson, a fruit specialist from Missouri, who coined the adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. It was a successful campaign indeed and not only are these words still spoken, but apples still appear in lunchboxes and are even offered as a more nutritious alternative to traditional side offerings like potato chips or French fries at many restaurants.
Bulmers Vintage Cider Ad
The known health benefits of apples go back for centuries, though it wasn’t by eating an apple a day to keep away the doctor. Since apples were used primarily for cider, it was their use in liquid form that was popular. Natural apple cider vinegar became a time-honored and respected home remedy for both humans and animals. Since 400BC, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, and many other doctors and homeopathic healers, have used vinegar and vinegar mixed with honey, as an energizing tonic and a healing elixir.
There’s been a surge in modern appeal as people look to more natural remedies and homeopathic cures. Apple cider vinegar is a completely natural product, resulting from the fermentation of apple juice to hard apple cider followed by a second fermentation to apple cider vinegar. It retains all the nutritional benefits of the apples from which it was made and is fortified with the extra acids and enzymes produced during the two fermentation steps. The combination of these ingredients give apple cider vinegar its touted health benefits, which can include improving heart health, weight loss, and possibly helping with insulin and blood sugar levels in Type 2 diabetes. It may also help prevent cancer due to the amount of antioxidants, but there is little scientific evidence to support this. A good way to add it to your diet is by using apple cider vinegar in your cooking—it’s calorie-free and adds wonderful flavor to food. If you plan on ingesting apple cider vinegar “straight” as a healthy elixir, be aware that it is highly acidic, so can be harmful to your tooth enamel, stomach lining, etc., so amounts should be kept minimal and diluting is recommended. Also be aware that it can interact with medications, so check with your doctor if you are currently on prescription medication.
Perhaps even more important and beneficial to those of us living down here in the sunny, swampy South, there are benefits from using apple cider vinegar externally as well. It is an excellent treatment for insect bites and can even be added to bathwater for a soothing soak. It’s also good for soothing sunburns. Another common use is to treat dandruff. It also works well on animals to deter insects like mosquitoes, fleas and ticks, to relieve skin conditions, and, in those horrible cases when necessary, to eliminate the smell of skunk.
It’s good for your home’s health too! Apple cider vinegar also works as a non-toxic household cleaner, deodorizer, and disinfectant. It’s not just for cleaning coffee pots and windows.
Another bonus is that you can brew your own apple cider vinegar at home. It’s surprisingly easy and the internet is filled with step-by-step guides. If you purchase it commercially, the best type of apple cider vinegar to use is one made from cold pressed, organically grown whole apples, in which no chemicals or preservatives have been added, which contains the "mother of vinegar" (a gelatinous substance formed during the last fermentation step), and is not pasteurized. It is available in most health food stores and can be purchased online.
So whether you stock up on apple cider vinegar, make some apple cider donuts (see the recipe on our website), or buy a few bags of apples to try the different varieties, indulge in apples this season. Remember, it’s nature’s treat!