Good Apple Country

Charlotte and I both smacked our lips this noon (and very likely again for dinner tonight) as we relished her freshly made sautéed apples. I can clearly recall making my first sautéed apples with friends, the Ohms from Janesville, one fall Saturday when I was still a bachelor. We decided to eat our dinner that evening in the kitchen at the Ridges Upper Rangelight Residence.

We had bought some local freshly picked apples and June decided to help me make this tantalizing dish on the old cast iron range, the “Queen.” Here is the recipe we still use:

Charlotte and her friend Flo try to pick a few ripe apples.

Cut two pounds of apples into eighths, removing the cores but leaving the skins on. This amount should just about fill your skillet. Pour in one-half cup of brown sugar and one-half cup sweet wine, such as cream sherry. Add one-half teaspoon nutmeg and two tablespoons butter. Cover skillet and cook until apples are fairly soft. Remove cover and cook until liquid is thick.

Right now we are eating our first Cortlands, a favorite for many years. As soon as the Honeygolds ripen we’ll also be stocking up on them from Krowas Orchard and storing them in our basement refrigerator. We’ve found that they retain their moisture and texture nicely when stored in quarter-bushel white plastic bags. We’ll still be eating the Honeygolds into March if all goes well.

One could accurately describe this versatile food as America’s number one, five-star fruit. It was Robert Frost, great American poet, who alerted me to an often-overlooked fact. His method was to slice apples in an unorthodox poetic matter. He said, “You never cut an apple from the top of the stem to the bottom. You cut and slice it sideways. When you do it that way it makes the apple easier to eat and it reduces waste. And you see the star shape of the seed containers.”

Botanically an apple is called a pome, a fleshy fruit without a stone. Hawthornes, serviceberries, pears and quinces are also pomes. Each fruit has a thin boney, plastic-like inner wall called the ovary wall, producing the tiny chambers which enclose the seeds. A cross-section of these chambers is a striking five-pointed star. It’s surprising how much of an apple is wasted when you throw the core away. As boys growing up in the predominantly Bohemian city of Kewaunee, an apple was a “YUB-ko.” Phonetic spelling for the Czech word for apple, “jablko,” (the “J” is pronounced as a “Y”). “Jablka” is plural for apple. Usually the “l” receives little attention in the pronunciation.

Little did we realize our expertise in locating good “yubka.” One apple tree, long overlooked by whoever owned it, grew near our favorite swimming beach just south of the old Leyse Aluminum Plant in Kewaunee. By August the green apples were just right for eating, sour as they were. But what a lift they would give us in our strenuous play and swimming. I doubt that any apples on that tree ever reached maturity during our boyhood.

As a youngster many winter nights were spent with my folks, brothers, and sister eating homemade popcorn topped off with our favorites, golden delicious apples, as we listened to Fibber McGee and Molly or some other radio programs. And many a time I climbed one of the McIntosh apple trees in our backyard at noon in fall to fetch a couple of delectable tree-ripened “Macs” to be eaten during afternoon school recess. Gosh those simple days were so delightful!

I can’t recall any person who made a better apple pie than my Grandma Skala. How expertly she could peel a Duchess of Oldenburg apple in one long continuous ribbon. Then she’d tell us to throw it over our shoulder. The letter formed as it fell to the floor would be that of the girl we would marry someday. The first one I tossed must have formed a “C,” the apple of my eye!

Cut an apple crosswise to see the five-pointed star inside.

Many a lucky farm boy was unknowingly exposed to some beautiful apple orchard ornithology in the family’s organically grown, unsprayed orchard. The one I recall the best was a transparent apple tree that grew right up against the south side of the cedar-shingled granary on my dad’s home farm which overlooked the gorgeous Opichka Valley (Kewaunee River valley). My two older brothers, Ivan and Leo, and I knew all about that tree which was never sprayed, and if there were a few tiny “worms” in one of those apples, we always said that they tasted exactly like the apple!

There could be found the nesting sites of the Eastern Kingbird, Robin, Goldfinches, Baltimore Oriole, Eastern Bluebird, Downy Woodpecker, Black-capped Chickadee, and others.

One well known tree grew at the west end of Anton Kieweg’s garden in Kewaunee, fortunately right across the hedge from our Saturday morning football “stadium.” That tree was a late October or early November tree as I recall. Those deep red apples seemed to improve in flavor after they were lightly laced with frost, and we just couldn’t stand to see those apples “go to waste.” More than once we had to carry them in our pockets for a while until they thawed enough to bite into.

Henry David Thoreau preferred to eat his apples “with a sauce of sharp November air” too. He would fill both front pockets with apples and then methodically eat one from the left pocket, then the right, so he would keep in good balance as he walked!

Count yourselves lucky to be living in good apple country where words such as tang, crispness, perfume, hardiness and tastiness are most often used to describe America’s five-star fruit, the Yubko!