Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Near the border of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, in the rolling hills of Amish country, you’ll find a produce market built like a medieval castle. The outside of the fortress features gaps in intervals along the walls, as if the building has been constructed for battle. Inside, there’s a king’s bounty of farm-fresh vegetables and fruits, braided pies, and a moat (metaphorical) flowing with sweet cider.
Welcome to Apple Castle—the King of Freshness since 1961—a stronghold in western Pennsylvania for, well, apples.
On this particular day, the market features Pristine apples, a hybrid cultivar developed in 1994. It’s a tart, early-summer apple with a beautiful golden aura and a stroke of pink. Next to those are Paula Reds, a fruity, thick-skinned type discovered in Michigan sometime in the 1960s. Apple lore says that the farmer who found it named it after his wife, Pauline. And further down, the word “heirloom,” written in cursive, regally unspools across a sign. It signals the Milton variety—an all-purpose, early-20th-century apple; the result, apparently, of a Mac grafted with a Yellow Transparent. It’s clear from their haughty presentation that these apples are some of the most prized of the bushel.
So it is these days at all manner of apple palaces, regular farm stands, and even some specialty grocery stores. “Heirloom” carries the patina of history and importance—a sense of inheritance that suggests the fruits bearing the title are of timeless quality. But what about the apples’ actual flavor? I mean, when is the last time you heard somebody say, “You know what I could really go for? An heirloom apple.” The cultural significance of heirlooms—their story, weaved through generations of family grafting and genealogy—is all fine and dandy, but hasn’t science rendered these older apple varieties obsolete? Are they really worth all the fuss? Fancying myself a devoted apple squire, I decided it was time to find out.
“I grow all kinds of crazy apples,” says Steven Johnston. He’s the slim, wholesome, and excited owner of Apple Castle, a sort of Willy Wonka figure but for fresh-picked fruits. “The real oddballs, like Milton. Yeah, I don’t know a single other orchard that grows Milton.”
Other heirloom apples sold by Johnston, or antique apples, as they’re sometimes called, include Dunning, Northern Spy, Stayman Winesap, Old-Fashioned Transparents, Chenango Strawberry, and Austin, just to name a few. Oh, those esoteric apple names don’t sound familiar to you? That’s because there are thousands of heirloom apples out there, and almost none of them are available at the local A&P.
Jennifer Jordan, a sociologist and author of Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods, has spent a lot of time thinking about the obscurity of apples. “You eat an apple and you’re eating a place. You’re eating a story. It’s the preservation of biodiversity, a cultural memory,” says Jordan, who has sampled countless heirloom apples in her research. Indeed, the only way to hold on to an apple, she tells me, is to graft it and hand it down through generations. It’s often quite literally an heirloom, a treasured family keepsake.
And indeed, unlike your casual heirloom tomato fanatic, it seems that ardent fans of apples are often pursuing something deeper than culinary excellence. It’s not just about the lust for a perfect snack or pie filler—apple enthusiasts seek a connection to family, heritage, and biodiversity. Recently, a customer stopped Johnston in his store to express their appreciation for the Fall Rambo, a Swedish heirloom apple that’s centuries old. Through their genealogy, this customer discovered that a family ancestor was famous for bringing the Fall Rambo tree to America. “We’re the only place growing the Fall Rambo, so he was excited,” says Johnston, before digressing: “To be honest, it’s nothing that makes you go crazy, but it’s a fine apple.”
Consuming a place and a story is all well and good, but just because a fruit has rich history or familial significance doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth eating. “We grow an apple variety called Mother,” Johnston admits. “It’s not that great of an apple, but it’s something my grandpa grew up with as a kid.”
Johnston’s family has owned the Apple Castle land for six generations, and he tries not to get too lost in the sentimentality for heirlooms, though he still keeps the 19th-century growing journals that belonged to his relative, Josiah Johnston. No, the man is simply and purely stoked about apples. “Personally, I just love growing something that’s good and good for you,” he says cheerfully.
Of course, there are some who say that once you taste the diversity of flavors heirlooms offer, you’ll never go back. Jordan, after years of research, now has what she describes as “an intolerance for insipid apples.” Her favorite variety? The Calville Blanc d’Hiver, a 16th-century French beauty that’s considered both a dessert and a snacking apple. “It’s so crisp and clean and a little bit tart and sweet,” she gushes. “It’s never mealy.” Jordan had grafted the Calville in her garden, but the rabbits destroyed it almost instantly. Luckily, her favorite orchard in New Berlin, Wisconsin, grows them.
But Jordan admits that it’s a hassle for people to go all the way to the orchard. And therein lies the crux of the problem with heirloom apples—they are often a pain in the ass, although few will say so outright. “Heirloom apples ripen unevenly. We have to go through the orchard and pick 3 or 4 times,” Johnston explains, accounting for the present lack of heirloom availability in larger grocery stores. “The big orchards selling to the grocery store, it’s one and done. They don’t have time. It’s a strip pick.”
The truth is that for the most part, customers are happy with the status quo. People aren’t exactly clamoring for apple diversity—we know this because grocery store apples have literally been designed by consumers. Shoppers love Honeycrisp, an apple created in the 1960s and then released in the ’90s by University of Minnesota scientists, and it has become a prized commodity at grocery store chains across the United States since. Cosmic Crisp, a seeming upgrade to the Honeycrisp, was released in 2019. Unlike the smaller, heirloom apples, grocery store apples are giant. Their appearance is akin to hulking, hormone-loaded chicken breasts. They’re thin-skinned, pleasingly tart, and sweet like candy—in short, they were conceived for the masses.
The process for creating such apples is largely the result of university breeding programs. Dave Snyder, a cider maker and poet in Catskill, New York, explains: “The way these breeding programs work is you sit down with a consumer group, and you poll them for what they like in an apple, then you go out there and graft apples that have those traits.” What do most people want? Sweet, tart, and crisp.
Though Snyder assures me he doesn’t want to detract from university programs, he puts it like this: “What if grocery stores all over the world only sold full-bodied Merlot? That’s a good wine, but imagine that was the only wine people sold. That’s what’s going on with apples.”
Snyder has sampled over 100 different types of heirloom apples. His appreciation for them means he’s often metaphorically sniffing, swirling, and tasting different apple notes as with a good wine. It’s a process that’s changed his taste for good. Admittedly, he has some contentious opinions, one being that he appreciates a soft, mealy one. “They’re applesauce in a tight little skin, and it’s got spicy notes, and it’s soft, and it’s this lovely and comforting thing,” he says excitedly. “You’re never going to sell someone on a mealy apple. But when you get to try all this stuff, you start to appreciate what they are. What if you had an opportunity to taste all the other wines in the world?”
Snyder and Jordan both agree: The biggest selling point of heirloom apples is their wildly unique diversity. Apples can be so much more than the university-designed sweet and tart flavor. Modern supermarket chains, meanwhile, are all too happy to ignore this diversity for the sake of predictability. “Some people want to eat the same thing every day,” Jordan allows. She’s very understanding, but I get the sense that she’s also slightly disappointed.
After enduring all this heirloom propaganda, I decided to do a taste test: Milton versus Honeycrisp. As of this writing, apples at Apple Castle are $1.59 a pound. At the grocery store chain down the street, they cost $1.89. I pick out a nice Honeycrisp apple from the local Kroger. It’s the late afternoon, so I wiggle my fingers for quite some time until I find one that isn’t dented or soft. At home, I first taste the Milton—it’s sweet but not cloying; floral, a shade reminiscent of raspberries. The crisp, juicy, clean flesh has a refreshing and nourishing flavor. It’s got a beefy skin, an oddly specific crunch, and a surprising amount of depth. It’s a deliciously pure snacking apple through and through. I find myself picking the flesh near the core like you would meat from a chicken wing.
Next is the Honeycrisp, which completely dwarfs the Milton in size—it’s nearly three times larger. It’s juicy, but in a watery, almost sodden way. The skin is far too thin, and the apple itself is too big. It takes so long to eat that I start looking at my phone halfway through. It’s forgettable—but in a way, that facelessness is comforting.
I prefer the Milton, but I can’t stop thinking about why I’m also drawn to the lesser Honeycrisp. Suddenly, I realize that it’s my own complacency. Honeycrisp is a reliable taste built on what large focus groups have decided is the platonic ideal of an apple. It’s boring, sure—but it’s easy. I don’t live near an apple orchard, so more often than not, I’ll be eating this Honeycrisp, and I’m not happy about it.
I wish heirloom apples were more readily available, but at the grocery store, I’m given four or five options, maximum, each of them commercialized, industrious, and homogenous in flavor. And so I’m usually eating Honeycrisp. Heirloom apples, meanwhile, are legion and provide a wider spectrum of taste; they’re interesting, funky, varied, and exciting. Remove the stories, the generations of grafting and family history—hell, even take out the word “heirloom”—and I suspect that these apples would still trump the commercial options in terms of flavor.
And so, I join the ranks of those like Jordan, who admitted that her work had turned her “into a very picky apple-eater.” I have glimpsed the promised land, tasted the heavenly manna, and yet I must live in dull, watery reality. Except, every once in a while, I’ll make the pilgrimage to Apple Castle. For there I know the honor and virtue of the fruit will be championed as long as there are trees to be picked.
