The Etiquette of Apples

by Deborah Swift

Jeanne Illenye - The Fateful Temptation

I have been lucky enough to be given a huge plastic bag full of apples from my friend's orchard, and have been busy cooking up stewed apples and freezing them, so I can enjoy them through the winter. Whilst looking up different recipes I cam across snippets of applelore, which I hope will give you a taste of apples and of Autumn.

The Latin malus means both “apple” and “evil,” which, according to some historians, is probably why the apple gained a reputation as the Forbidden Fruit, when most scholars agree the original fruit was probably a pomegranate, though Michelangelo’s Temptation and Fall on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel features forbidden figs. By the 17th century, the apple being the commonest fruit in Europe, the fruit responsible for man's Fall from Grace was widely believed to be the apple.

Victorian Costermonger

The first evidence of deliberate cultivation dates from the period of the Roman invasion of Britain, but by the 9th century records show that cider making was already well established, and the Norman French brought with them a number of new varieties of apple, including the Costard. This apple is no longer grown, but its existence is preserved in the word costermonger -- a seller of Costard apples.

In North America nearly everyone has heard of 'Johnny Appleseed'. During the late 18th Century he planted orchards right from Pennsylvania in the east through to Indiana in the west. According to legend, the indigenous population regarded him as a medicine man, because of his combination of enthusaism for nature and his religious devotion, which involved distributing tracts along with the seeds.

When eating apples at the table or in company, a range of 'apple etiquettes' became common. In Georgian times, coring the apple was done with a silver apple corer. When they first appeared in the 1680’s they were a long silver cylinder, with a scallop shaped cutting blade. Some rare examples have a hollow compartment at one end in which sugar, cinnamon and other spices to add flavour would have been kept. Gentlemen carried these, as it was fashionable for the genmtleman to assist the lady, and peel and core the fruit for her. Some had a handle that unscrewed, so the device could be stored in a pocket more easily. Apple corers in this form were popular until about 1820.

Gentleman's Silver Apple corer from 1690

Fruit was widely used as a dessert and special cutlery was used in the Victorian era to eat it. When fresh fruit was served, a small plate accompanied by a fruit knife and fork were exchanged for the dessert plate.

Above is a Victorian mother of pearl handled pocket fruit knife and fork, each with its own little leather carrying case.

There is a knack to peeling the fruit elegantly in polite company. Holding the fruit by the fork, the apple is stood straight up and peeled from top to bottom without being touched by the hands. When the entire fruit has been peeled, it should be carefully sliced into small morsels and eaten one piece at a time. I should think many people found their apple shooting unexpectedly across the table!

For more information on how to eat fruit correctly with or without cutlery, (including bananas and all sorts of other fruit) I recommend you go here. Of course I can't imagine many of us will feel the need for such extreme etiquette, but it is fascinating!

Still Life -  Balthazar Van Ast .17th Century

Happy Autumn everyone.

Find my books at www.deborahswift.com

or follow me on @swiftstory

More 'apple' links:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/07/22/history-of-apples/

http://www.witheridge-historical-archive.com/apples.htm

'Cat's Heads and Yowlers' by Karen Maitland

A Humber Sloop, the 'Harry' from Barton on the Humber

A few years ago, I had the privilege of editing the autobiography of an elderly gentleman who had grown up on the banks of the Humber estuary on the east coast of England. His father had sailed sloops laden with coal down the canals from the coal mines in the heart of England to the clay works at Barton on the estuary, before sailing across the treacherous North Sea to Holland with cargoes of clay tiles. There were no engines on these sloops. They relied on wind, currents and the skill of the boatmen.

To bring a sloop, under sail, with such a heavy cargo alongside the loading jetty involved a three-point turn, in which bow and stern lines had to be fastened to the shore with precisely the right timing and at the correct length, to enable the force of the surging water to turn the ship around, all this in an estuary notorious for its lethal cross-currents. To make his job even more tricky, because of the shifting sand banks in the Humber, they needed the spring tides to be able to unload and load the cargoes, which only occurred once a fortnight, so if the sloop failed to make it to the clay works to meet those tides, it would mean many days of costly delay.

Illustration from 'Pomona Britannica'

showing the four best apple varieties 

grown at Hampton Court

The elderly man, who’d spent his childhood among the clay-workers, also told me how in cold wet weather the skin on the clay-diggers’ hands would split open, leaving raw cracks deep enough to balance an old penny upright, a trick which was often demonstrated to horrified visitors in the pub who would reward the old workers with a pint of beer. Such details of the human cost can never be found in formal factory records.

I was reminded of his stories recently, when I attended an apple harvest celebration in Cornwall, where visitors were invited to sample the fruit from over fifty old varieties, once thought to be lost, but which are now carefully being nurtured again, not least to provide a vital gene bank of the old apple varieties which will be badly needed should new diseases attack our modern hybrid crops.

As I wandered among apples of all shapes and flavours with wonderful old names such as – Cornish Gilliflower, Count of Wick, Cat’s head, Ellison’s Orange, Pig’s Snout, Sops in wine, Fair Maid of Devon & Slack ma girdle – I was reminded that it is not just the gene-pool of plants and old rare breed animals we need to preserve for the future, but the old skills and knowledge of crafts, farming and industries as well, many of which, are fast disappearing.

Ellison's Orange growing at Barton on the Humber

Photographer: David Wright

At the same time, I was editing the book about the Humber, I had also volunteered for a project to record elderly people talking about their lives as farmers and craftsmen in times when everything was done by hand. The idea was a good one, to preserve their voices and their knowledge for future historians. But sadly, in a few short years, the machines on which those tape-recordings or floppy discs were made have become obsolete and many local libraries, archives and museums have thrown away the recordings, because they have no means of playing them. Only those memories were which transcribed and printed have survived, an invaluable resource for future historical novelists like me, and for any future generations who may need to relearn those vital skills.

In meantime, we must treasure the names of those long-vanished occupations, in the way we savour the taste of those old apples we came so close to losing forever. So, I leave you with just a few of my favourites –

Medieval Occupations during the farming year circa 1470-1475

Fripper – A person who bought and sold second-hand clothes, or a broker who lent money to those who pawned their clothes.

Gatward – goat herder

Mouldiwarp catcher – Mole catcher

Death hunter – A Victorian street pamphlet vendor who specialised in selling copies of salacious deathbed confessions, final speeches delivered from the gallows and lurid accounts of murders.

Escheater – someone who appropriated land for the king when the landowner died without an heir. Regarded by many as legalised theft, the title of the office gave rise to the word cheat.

Mueman – a maker of little cages for birds or small pet animals

Purefinder – a child or elderly person who collected dog dung from the streets to sell to leather tanners to treat hides before tanning in a process known as puering.

Saintier – a bell founder or maker of church bells.

Yowler – a 17th century assistant to a master thatcher, who handed him the yowles of straw.

Comfort Me With Apples - Katherine Langrish

It’s September, and our apple tree has been so laden with fruit this year that branches have actually cracked and broken off under the weight, as though taking Keats’ lines from Ode to Autumn –

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core… 

far too literally. The lawn is now almost ankle deep in windfalls… 

What is it about apples? Why are they so evocative? Why was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – not actually named in the Bible – assumed to be an apple? Why did the Firebird, in Russian folklore, steal golden apples from the garden of the Czar? Why did golden apples of immortality grow in the Garden of the Hesperides, why was the Norse goddess Idun the keeper of golden apples which preserved the youth of the gods? Why was the Apple of Discord – with its inscription To the Fairest – an apple, and why were three golden apples so irresistible to Atalanta that she paused to pick them up and lost her race? (Mind you, that dress wouldn't help.)

The apple as the fruit of immortality, or perhaps equally of death, appears as a symbol in Celtic mythology too.  Heralds from the Land of Youth might bear a silver apple branch, with silver blossom and golden fruit, whose tinkling music lulled the hearers to sleep – perhaps to everlasting sleep…  And Arthur, after his final battle, went to the island of Avalon, the island of apples, to be healed of his mortal wound. Then of course there’s the apple given by the wicked Queen to Snow-White, one bite of which sends the little princess into a death-like sleep.   

Apples are tokens of love and promises of eternity. In Yeat’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, the lovelorn Aengus seeks forever the beautiful girl from the hazel wood.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands

I find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

But such an eternity is probably also the land beyond death. 

Where do apples even come from, why are they so ubiquitous?  Why, even today, are so many varieties available - even in supermarkets, usually the home of homogeneity? I went into our local Sainsburies the other day and counted eleven different named varieties of apple all on sale at once:  Empire, Royal Gala, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Russets, Granny Smiths, Pink Ladies, Jazz, Braeburns and Bramleys. By contrast, there were only four named varieties of pears, and everything else was generic – bananas, strawberries, oranges, etc.

Apples are related to roses, I’m delighted to tell you.  According to a rather lovely book called ‘Apples: the story of the fruit of temptation’, by Frank Browning (Penguin 1998):

‘In the beginning there were roses.  Small flowers of five white petals opened on low, thorny stems, scattered across the earth in the pastures of the dinosaurs, about eighty million years ago. …These bitter-fruited bushes, among the first flowering plants on earth, emerged as the vast Rosaceae family and from them came most of the fruits human beings eat today: apples, pears, plums, quinces, even peaches, cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries.

‘The apple [paleobotanists believe]… was the unlikely child of an extra-conjugal affair between a primitive plum from the rose family and a wayward flower with white and yellow blossoms of the Spirea family, called meadowsweet.’ 

Isn’t that wonderful? Apples as we know them today developed in Europe and Asia.  The Pharoahs grew them. The Greeks and Romans grew them. And they keep. You can store apples overwinter, eat them months after you’ve picked them: fresh fruit in hard cold weather when there’s nothing growing outside. So perhaps you would think of them as life-giving, immortal fruit. They smell fragrant. They feel good too: hard-fleshed, smooth, a cool weight in the hand.  

The medieval lyric Adam lay y-bounden provocatively celebrates the Fall of Man when Adam ate the forbidden fruit:

And all was for an appil

An appil that he toke

As clerkes finden

Written in her boke.

It ends on the mischievously subversive thought that if Adam had not eaten the apple, Our Lady would never have become the Heavenly Queen:

Blessed be the time

That appil take was!

Therefore we maun singen:

Deo gratias.

Here is a poem by John Drinkwater (surely the most poetically-named poet ever!) which captures some of those mystical coincidences of apples, eternity, sleep, moonlight, magic and death. 

MOONLIT APPLES

At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,

And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those

Apples are deep-sea apples of green.  There goes

A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.

A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then

There is no sound at the top of the house of men

Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again

Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.

They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams

On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams

Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams

And quiet is the steep stair under.

In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep.

And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep

Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep

On moon-washed apples of wonder.

Picture credits:

Apple tree: Author's garden

Atalanta racing Hippomenes: Willen van Herp, c1650

Adam and Eve: Lucas Cranach, 1537

Apple Tree: Arthur Rackham