When I hold the apple of the sheep’s nose in my hand, it feels like a knotted, clenched fist. I bite his hard, bumpy knuckles. It’s not too sweet, like mellow Honeycrisp, and the meat is foamy and juicy. This is a very fun apple to eat. I google “sheep’s nose” to compare the animal with the apple, which has an elongated shape of a funhouse looking apple. A sheep’s face, I understand, consists mainly of a long snout. I am fascinated, and already nostalgic for it. When will I ever eat one of these again?
Sheep’s nose apples don’t have the farmer’s market fandom of superstar Honeycrisp. I can’t find them near me in Michigan; It was put in my bag by a friend in Norfolk, Connecticut, before I boarded a plane home. (It was a nice complement to a mini bag of SunChips – thanks, Delta.)
However, if you look hard enough—and cross a few state lines—there’s a world of chunky, delicious heirloom apples waiting for their moment of most niche glory. Finding and tasting these obscure apples will take everything you expected about an apple and throw it out the window. Soon you will be looking for rough fruits with brown skin that look like old rocks because they taste amazing. You will learn how to spell “Ashmed’s Core”, and then you will announce them. And maybe, just maybe, after a few years of stalking orchards every fall, you’ll come across some in the grocery store.
It was in a grocery store that the New York artist William Mullen, known as @pomme_queen On Instagram, she was tempted by a potato. Well, it looked like one, but it was actually an Egremont Rust apple. It was a special British grocery store, and it was a British variety. “The name felt self-important for an apple,” said Mullen, who was a barbershop assistant and lifeguard at the time. He bit into one on his way home from the store. “It blew me away with that nutty taste, the dense texture and the aromatic acidity that reminded me of citrus. The epitome of autumn.”
Were there any more apples like this? He went home and googled “apples”, as one does. He discovered the site Orange Pippin, an apple tasting note site run by hobbyists (which doesn’t feel like a strong enough word for him). Egremont Rust, says Orange Pippin, “is a classic English red apple from the Victorian era. While russet apples have generally fallen out of favour, the Egremont Russet remains popular with discerning apple lovers who appreciate its unique taste and appearance.”
Mullen realized that “the apples we see in the supermarket are the smallest part of what’s out there,” he said, adding that he had nothing against the noble pink lady. “And I want to taste as much as possible.”
Photos by William Mullen taken from Odd Apples
Now the brand manager of the bean-to-pack chocolate brand Raqqa In Brooklyn, Mullan has a side gig that has made him one of the biggest unintentional marketers of heirloom apples. He takes vivid and impressive photographs of them (as well as of grapes, Mushrooms, flowers and snails), which you can see in his book Strange apples.
In September, Mullen presented a cultural history of the fruit alongside a tasting of rare apples in Brooklyn The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD). America’s apple industry homogenized and moved away from local sources in the early 1900s, when the advent of cross-country railroads allowed large quantities of fruit to be shipped across the country. Along with this, the rise of corporate nurseries such as Stark Brothers pioneered the marketing of apples by focusing on just a few varieties, starting with Ye Olde Red Delicious. (The growth of suburbs and supermarkets sealed the deal.) I grew up thinking there were only red, green and yellow apples. I was at least 7,000 varieties short.
At the MOFAD tasting, Mullen brought a rare Rust with handles M Scott Farm, a heritage apple paradise in Dormerston, Vermont. “It looks like a toad, or a burnt piece of wood . . . or a rock,” he said. “It has a dense, bark-like skin and a citrusy, nutty flavor.” Chewing is jaw training. And it was the apple that most of the guests flocked to try.
“Russeting” is an inflated word I didn’t know. Mullen described it as “a genetic expression when the top skin layer of the apple is damaged by environmental stress”—say, extreme weather changes—”then the tree responds by sending additional metabolites into the flesh, which concentrates the flavor.” The apple will end up with a “rusty, cracked, dull and uninviting exterior,” he said, “but the taste is much better, much more complex and concentrated.” And while the challenging aesthetic might disqualify these apples from a place at a fine grocery retailer, the real heads know, and the apples sell for around $3 a pound, depending on where you live.
One of the most popular red apples is the Ashmead’s Kernal. On a foggy October morning, my partner and I drove half an hour on gravel roads outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to find him at Elber Orchard. We saw trees with clusters of deep burgundy apples so heavy they almost touched the grass. These were Arkansas black apples, with a rock-hard density that scratches the roof of the mouth and a taste reminiscent of brandy.
Inside the farm shop, bees were everywhere. They buzzed the cider donut case and around the people waiting in line, who didn’t seem bothered. Co-owner Terez Boussuri buzzed around, too, reaching her blue-rimmed arm into apple crates to make me half an heirloom poke. She picked up a pale green Cleville Blanc d’Hiver bulbous and mentioned that the variety was once grown by Thomas Jefferson.
“Doesn’t that remind you of French furniture?” she asked, and I imagined the apple as a curvy side table in Marie Antoinette’s private rooms. Then she handed me a small golden Hudson stone, a red apple with a golden skin. “Try it!” Its delicate flavor reminded me of a pear, with an almost lactic and creamy flesh. I adored – and devoured – it.
But my prize was Ashmed’s core. He looks like a squat round rock, his skin is completely rusty. Biting him is like French kissing a cat. The taste is explosive, perfectly balanced acidic sweetness, without hard or soft meat. When I asked Mulan which apple he thought had the most potential to take off in Honeycrisp form, he pointed to Ashmed’s Core, and now I’m checking it out too. “People need to give up the idea of what an apple should look like,” he said. We buy funky heirloom tomatoes, don’t we?
Mullen’s friend Matt Kaminsky, a woodworker and cider maker in Hadley, Mass., is an apple lover of a slightly different breed: a wild variety. Kaminsky was called by name Philippine generals online (“‘Pippin’ is orchard slang for a wild apple,” he tells me, “and it’s also used to describe old, scruffy-looking trees”), where he shares progress from his orchards and musings on pomological theory.
Kaminski is looking for the next big wild apple – if you’ve got one, Please send it to him. The difference between heirloom and wild apples is that heirloom apples are rare varieties (over 50 years old) that have been carefully propagated by orchardists to maintain the consistency of the fruit. In nature, apples are inconsistent and change, like people. Their offspring don’t always fall close to the tree. Wild apples are grown the old-fashioned way: A bird might poop on a seedling that grows into a tree by the East River or right in your backyard. (Kaminsky’s book, The apple grower’s guidecan show you the way.) They are completely one of a kind.
Biting him is like French kissing a cat. The taste is explosive, perfectly balanced acidic sweetness, without hard or soft meat.
In the third year, Kaminsky just hosted A Pomological exhibition as a part of Ciderday, a local celebration in Ashfield, Massachusetts. People from all over North America sent in boxes of their wild apples or wild pears, which also had to be named (“Deathfall Pear,” “Smokestack Crab,” and “Bitter Donut” were some of the 154 submissions). The apple beauty contest, the 200 or so participants voted for the best apple to eat, the best apple for making cider, the best crabapple and the best pear.
“Wild apple trees thrive in the margins,” said Kaminsky, “without human intervention, self-seeded, grown without problems, without fungicide, without pesticides.” His show is an opportunity to geek out and show off cool new apples, but it’s also an opportunity to try to spread the winner into something bigger. What if your wild apple is not only delicious but disease resistant and good for long storage?
Heirloom apples are an extension of the past, Mullen said, but “these are the apples of the future.”
