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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Red Delicious

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  • From: Spidra Webster <spidra@speakeasy.net>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Red Delicious
  • Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 01:38:14 -0700


On Oct 17, 2007, at 10:13 PM, Michael Nave wrote:

I hope future generations never know the taste of Red
"Delicious" (and what a fraudulent name that was). It
is almost single handedly responsible for the decline
in apple consumption in the latter half of the 20th
century. No one ever ate a red delicious apple and
said "yum, I need to eat more apples." It's the worst
tasting apple I have ever experienced. It's not a
plain old sugary apple. It's a plain old tasteless
apple.

Yup. I didn't know it at the time, but it was Red Delicious that was responsible for me deciding "I don't like red apples". I liked green apples (which, it turned out, were Pippins and then later Granny Smiths). But I never tasted a red apple I liked. Since they were just called apples in the supermarket and not really associated with cultivar names, I didn't know that there were different cultivars that could taste very different. It's only in the last couple years that I've rediscovered apples. First, by tracking down the Newtown Pippins of my youth and secondly by being introduced to red or reddish apples that taste good. What a surprise!

There's an orchard near here in El Sobrante that was reclaimed from brambles. The new owners rehabilitated it and tracked down the cultivar types. It turns out the man who planted it in the '60s or so bought his trees from Starck Bros. He planted Gravensteins and Pippins, which I find to be delicious, but I was surprised that the non-commercial orchard also had such wastes of space as Red Delicious. I figured I had better try one to see if being grown organically and tree-ripening made a difference. Although it made a difference, the difference was slight. You still have an apple that was bred for looks and the ability to ship well. Taste was clearly secondary.

Thankfully, diving into the world of home orchards, local food and heirloom varieties has taught me that it wasn't the color of the apple that made it taste bad. Not all red apples are bad. But Red Delicious is a contradiction in terms.

Megan Lynch

Berkeley, CA




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