Say my name, say my name...

We’re deep into apple season now, and over the past few weeks, as Jason and I gulped big glasses of cider with dinner and munched on Empire apples from our farm share, a snippet of a lecture I once heard on the radio kept coming back to me. The speaker was an apple crusader by the name of Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. I use the term “crusader” rather than, say, “enthusiast,” because Mr. Calhoun is a man with a mission: to save as many antique apple varieties as possible in the name of genetic diversity.

Back in the 19^th century, the apple scene in America was very different. It was brimming with apple varieties, some good for eating, some for cooking, some for making applejack. And when I say brimming, I’m not talking about the few dozen that you’re probably able to name—there were thousands of varieties, over 16,000 by some estimations, in the late 1800s. But as family farms gave way to mass agriculture, all but the heartiest, most transportable, most eye-pleasing varieties were gradually lost. There are still about 3,000 varieties, but the vast majority of them are like endangered species, available only from specialty orchards.*

To illustrate his point, Mr. Calhoun often gives audiences a list of extinct apple varieties and, without telling them what they are, asks them to scan the list for their last names. That’s how genetically diverse American apples once were: almost every family could claim their own apple variety. I was dying to know—did my family have an apple? Had it survived? But since I’d heard Calhoun’s speech on the radio rather than in person, I didn’t have a copy of his extinct varieties. So I headed down the Google rabbit hole, trying to discover my ancestral apples.

Coming from farm stock and having been raised in Johnny Appleseed territory, I thought my chances were pretty good. Of my four grandparents, two had come from farming families, though one of these seemed more likely to have a tobacco variety named after them. My paternal grandfather’s line, with their farm in Cadiz, Ohio, was the most likely to hit the apple jackpot, I thought, and carried the bonus of sharing my maiden name, so I started hunting for Dunlap apples.

Weirdly, I felt a little nervous while I was searching. What if Dunlap apples were lousy? What would that say about us as a clan? I doubted that Mr. Calhoun would agree with this line of thought, but what if your family apple was like a horoscope?

And then I found it, popping up on an heirloom apple orchard’s website like it had been waiting for me for years: the Twenty Ounce, also known as Dunlap’s Aurora. (That’s a photo of it at the beginning of this post.) “Originating in New York in the early 1800′s, Twenty Ounce is a very large, showy fruit and an excellent cooking apple,” the description read. “Cooks easily and makes a fine applesauce. Large, roundish fruit with a thick, tough greenish-yellow skin with stripes and splashes of carmine and deep red. The whitish-yellow flesh is coarse, tender and juicy. Ripens in September.” I felt a strange flush of pride at its massive size (we are a tall people, it’s true), its juiciness buried beneath a tough exterior, its role in the kitchen and its tenacity in surviving the twentieth century. Even though it originated in New York rather than Ohio, I was convinced; I had found our apple.

Of course, I still have to find our apple. Since it ripens in September, I might have missed my chance this year, but I’ll be scouring farmers markets next fall. And maybe in some future yard, I can plant a tree full of Dunlap’s Auroras so that Dunlap progeny can frolic and picnic in its shade and gnaw on the fruit’s tough skin and coarse whitish-yellow flesh. Here’s hoping, at least.

What does your apple say about you? Start with this website, and let me know in the comments if you manage to find your own ancestral apple.

*This is obviously an issue that exceeds the scope of a blog post; for more on dwindling crop diversity and why it matters, check out this book by a compatriot of Calhoun.