Apples

I'm not sure if I've written about apples before. I'm thinking of pie because it's apple harvesting season in Wenatchee, where bins of apples are being hauled out of the orchards, and literally millions of boxes of apples are leaving by truck or train.

Vake loved apple pie. When he and Milly were first married, she wanted to make a pie for him, but had no rolling pin. She asked to borrow one from their landlady, Mrs. VanAlstein. At first, the landlady refused, but seeing Milly's disappointment, she relented--but only on the condition that Milly promise not to wash the wooden rolling pin, that had been well-seasoned with fats from years of pie crusts. (Mrs. VanAlstein probably didn't know that Sylvia and Milly had driven into her orchard when she was away, and filled the trunk of Sylvia's car with apples. Mrs. VanAlstein never used the apples; she saved them for the deer.) 

Every time Vake ate apple pie for the rest of his life, he declared that it was the best he had ever tasted.  Milly made her crust with a recipe called "Never fail pie crust" that had an egg and some vinegar in it, but she claimed that the secret to her success was making the crust with real lard.

In the 1950s and 60s when Vake and Milly were living at Florence and raising four kids, every autumn, they awaited the arrival of the "Apple Man," a truck farmer from Yakima who drove through the neighborhood selling his orchard and garden produce. Milly would buy a flat of tomatoes, a gunny sack full of green beans (50#), sometimes a small box of cherry tomatoes to eat straight out of the box, and a 23# box of apples. Of course, some of the apples went straight to pie. With what was left, we peeled, cored, chopped, cooked down with sugar and spice, pressed through a conical collander using a conical wooden mashing tool, and can the resulting apple sauce.

One autumn in the 1970s or 1980s, a bumper crop of apples loaded every apple tree in the Seattle area. Brook's Boy Scout troop picked apples and hauled them to a fire station to be carried to food banks. I looked everywhere  in my paper cookbooks, and finally found a recipe for apple butter. Today, it takes about three seconds to find an apple butter recipe on the internet.

That year, Milly and Vake had a box of apples sitting in their garage at Dunes City. The deer came right into the garage to eat them.

Here in Wenatchee, culled apples are lying on the ground below the freshly harvested trees. As they decay, it's possible to smell their cider odor just walking past. Unlike grocers in Seattle, all the grocers around here carry lard that's good for crusts, because the lard also happens to be a staple for the resident Mexican population.

This morning I baked apple turn-overs. I didn't have lard in the house, but the gluten-free crust recipe from America's Test Kitchen turned out great. It's made with butter instead of lard, and the water in the butter makes the crust flaky and light. It tastes almost better than the apple filling.