Source: Wikipedia

A few months back, the editor of a new drinks magazine out of Scotland called Hot Rum Cow contacted me to talk applejack for the next issue of his magazine. How could I refuse him? Apples? Scotland? I’m in. We had a great chat and the issue is now out (preview here).

Seeing the story (in an issue dedicated to cider) reminded me that winter is prime applejack season. Applejack is hard cider’s burly cousin, the one with an edge that breathes fire, particularly in its colonial American incarnation.

Early Americans made applejack at home. In the winter. They would fill a barrel with cider in the fall and then leave the barrel outside to freeze. As the water froze, they would skim off the slush leaving the alcohol behind. A few times through this freezing process yielded a highly potent and potentially dangerously impure drink behind. How dangerous? Some referred to applejack as “the essence of lockjaw.”

Applejack like hard cider was vital to colonial life. Apples grew where grains and grapes did not. Everyone had an orchard, and turning apples into alcohol was an efficient and easy way to preserve a harvest too large to consume as whole fruit. Applejack even helped to fuel revolution as Laird (the oldest commercial distillery in the U.S.) supplied George Washington and his troops with applejack.

Today, of course, distillers use more controlled methods of making applejack so we can drink without fear. And thankfully, there’s more of it to drink as applejack seems to be benefiting from the cocktail boom.

There are so many places that brag that George Washington rested his ponytail on their beds – it seems far cooler to me to say you drank what George drank.

Homer print by John Faber the Elder
Source: British Museum, 1902,1011.942

Homer’s Odyssey, written in the 8th or 9th century BCE, contains what is believed to be the first written mention of apples in the ancient world:

“Outside the gate of the outer court there is a large garden of about four acres with a wall all round it. It is full of beautiful trees- pears, pomegranates, and the most delicious apples.” 

Mycenean hero Odysseus sees the orchard when he seeks refuge in the court of King Alcinous. This was the first of what would become many ancient stories featuring apples.

One of the most well-known Greek myths concerns the golden apple labeled “To the fairest” that Eris, goddess of strife and discord, threw among the guests at the wedding celebration of Peleus and Thetis. True to her name, Eris’ apple caused a fight between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. Each claimed the apple and its inscription for herself. They eventually agreed to make Paris, the son of the King of Troy, settle the matter. After much bribery among the goddesses, Paris chose Aphrodite because she had promised him the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. This promise ultimately led to the Trojan War.

This wasn’t the only time Aphrodite became involved with apples. The goddess of love, Aphrodite frequently appeared with apples and as a result, apples featured in many Greek myths involving love, courtship, and marriage. Perhaps the most famous is the story of Atalanta. Racing all of her suitors to avoid marriage, Atalanta manages to outrun all but Hippomenes, who defeated her not by speed, but by cunning. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples, which he threw at Atalanta, distracting her enough to win the race and her hand in marriage as the prize.

But interestingly enough, the Greek word melon was used for almost any kind of round fruit that grows on a tree. So the many legendary apples of Greek myth – from Homer to Atalanta – may have been other kinds of tree fruit or perhaps no particular fruit at all. It’s important to note, though, that Europeans interpreted these classical references to fruit as apples, just as they had the supposed apple in the Garden of Eden.

Apples meant something both symbolically and literally to people. As apple trees took root around the world, its fruit took root in art, poetry, music, mythology, legend, and prose. The apple inspired an explosion of literature and illustration all over the temperate world, a degree of adulation nearly impossible to imagine for any other fruit.

Apple pie
Source: Sage Ross

Fall is pie season. Sure, other seasons offer their fair share of delicious berry and fruit pies, but nearly everyone can agree that pie reaches its apogee in the fall. Pecan, pumpkin, sweet potato, and of course, apple.

There’s nothing more American than apple pie, right? Well…

Recipes for apple pie – or at least something we’d recognize as a pie with a crust and a sweet filling – have been around in England, Italy, France, and Germany since the Middle Ages. The French tend to prefer open-faced tarts while the English placed chunks of apple in sturdy crusts. English playwright and poet Robert Green wrote in 1590 that he could think of no greater compliment to give a beautiful woman than “They breath is like the steame of apple-pyes.” I suppose it could have been worse…

English colonists brought their pies with them to America. These pies were nearly as robust as the hardy colonists themselves with the apples buried in a hard thick crust that often played the dual role of crust and cooking vessel. The first American cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons (1796), contained two recipes for apple pie and one for Marlborough pudding, a kind of pie that used stewed instead of fresh apples.

But even if we didn’t invent the pie, we certainly made the apple pie our own, as evidenced by that popular expression. In a 1759 letter home to Sweden, colonist Israel Acrelius wrote from Delaware that “Apple pie is used throughout the whole year… It is the evening meal of children. House pie, in country places, is made of Apples neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it.” Characters in 19th century novels frequently ate, purchased, or baked apple pies. In Little Women, Jo teaches her niece Daisy to bake an apple pie. Many New Englanders and people in rural communities ate apple pie for breakfast in the 19th century, seeing it as a wholesome and filing way to start the day.

In the 1890s, we began to eat apple pie and ice cream with the title “a la mode.” The title (if not the idea of eating the two together) supposedly came from the Cambridge Hotel in New York state where Charles Townsend regularly ordered his apple pie with ice cream. When he was asked what his dessert was called by Mrs. Berry Hall, a diner seated near him one night, he said he didn’t know. She promptly dubbed it “a la mode.”

Albrecht Durer, Adam and Eve, 1504
Source: Victoria and Albert Museum

The Garden of Eden isn’t an object per se, but it’s hard – maybe impossible – to talk about the apple without at least mentioning that famous event in that famous garden in that really, really famous book. Of all the ideas associated with apples, the notion of paradise probably springs to mind most readily. Most modern Christians believe that Eve snatched the apple for Adam at the serpent’s bidding, forever banishing them from Paradise.

But there’s a problem with this version of events. The original Hebrew text only says “fruit” – it never says which fruit, apple or otherwise. But artistic depictions of the event, ranging from serious religious paintings to cartoons, nearly always show an apple as the fruit in question.

How did that happen?

The apple began appearing in devotional works  in Western art in the Middle Ages. Early Christian scholars interpreted the forbidden fruit to be an apple, possibly because the Latin word malum can mean both “apple” or “evil.” It also probably helped that apples were more popular in Europe, where most of these Christians lived, than in the Middle East, where the Garden likely grew. They needed a fruit, looked out the window, saw apples, and voila! Apples received the… crown.

However, it’s pretty unlikely that sweet apples could grow on land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Apple seeds require a cold chill to germinate, a climactic condition that area of the world is not known for. The Eastern Church, perhaps more climactically aware, favored figs as the forbidden fruit. The struggle between apples and figs played out for centuries in religious art.

But the fig has something else in its favor besides climate – what happens after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit? They cover themselves in fig leaves, not apple branches!

It didn’t really matter what the fruit was, though, because after the Garden of Eden, the possession of apples came to be associated with danger, desire, and fecundity – an association that proved hard to shake for many centuries.

Just to confuse matters more, some scholars now suppose the fruit to have been a pomegranate.