On the apple

One of my favorite foods, I’ll eat apples in almost any form: fresh, sauce, caramel, pie, juice, cider, baked. Those round red (or yellow or green) orbs of juiciness are to die for. Especially, this time of year when the fresh apples are starting to appear in the supermarkets. I have already written here about making pie, and apple pie is my favorite. As a five-year-old in kindergarten we peeled apples, chopped them up, and fried them with a little lard to make apple butter. Apple butter is to die for on fresh crunchy toasted home-made bread. I like to put grated apple into oatmeal with a little brown sugar and cinnamon. Perhaps what I most like about apples, however, is the simplicity of the fruit itself. Just wash it and start eating. Yes, a little juice might go up your nose in the first bite, but you wipe your chin off and plan your second bite. Red apples look very inviting, but it is the party-colored apples that really have all the flavor. I believe that apples grow everywhere in the world. In Spain they make a naturally fermented cider that when served cold is a most delightful taste sensation. The apple is, of course, the paradigm for all snacks, given by Eve to Adam when he just couldn’t get enough. Does anyone honestly blame him for taking and eating the apple? Would you have done anything differently? When I was in cross-country a number of years ago, we would often plan our routes to include an apple orchard, or at least until the sheriff showed up and told us to stop. There’s a small restaurant in northern Spain in Santillana del Mar called Casa Cossio that serves the most delicious baked apples for dessert, cinnamon, sugar, a twist of orange. It leaves you wanting more. Until I got my braces on as a teenager, fall was all about buying a bag of caramels and some apples and making candy apples. It gets all over your face, your hands, stuck in your teeth, makes an enormous sticky mess, but it is so worth it. As I eat my caramel apple I can feel the cool breezes of October, smell the dry leaves that have already fallen from the trees, stared at the dead gray sky which threatened snow. The big debate when eating apples is, I guess, whether to peel or not. Apple skin has never bothered me, although it will get stuck in your teeth, but that’s what floss is for, right? Apple juice, especially when doctored with cinnamon and other spices–cloves and all-spice–fills a room with glorious smells when heated. On a frigid January day nothing will thaw out a frozen snow shoveler like a nice, hot mug of spiced cider. You might even forget, if just for a moment, that the ice is hard, the snow is deep, that the wind is out of the north, and that the windchill factor is double-digits below zero. Hot apple cider has a way of mending what is broken in your soul, of giving your tired, aching muscles hope, of making winter an okay place to be. On a hot summer day in Texas, you pour it over ice and add a twist of lemon and the heat doesn’t seem nearly as horrible as it is. The apple pie is the perfect dessert–no debate there. I’m not allergic to apples or anything they might put in a crust, so if I am eating out, I can usually trust the apple pie to hold me over until the next meal. The apple is composed of gracious, sensuous lines and curves that suggest erotic pleasures and unnamed delights. The apple lives in its own metaphors, subverting its own innocence while giving boundless pleasure to its consumers. The next time you eat an apple, I suspect you might have a new appreciation for this simple fruit.