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October 24 - 31, 1 9 9 7
[Tales From Tritown]

Apples wild

Getting to the core at harvest time

by Sally Cragin

[Tritown] Some distance from the Mountain Lair, beyond the Tarbox Automotive junk-car graveyard, you'll find a small and untidy orchard. These apple and pear trees look bountiful, but their fruit is small and worm-ridden. No one ever sprays these crops or keeps the branches trimmed, but every year they bear fruit. The small grove is the delight of bees, squirrels, and raccoons and, of course, Lorencz the Hermit. He lives some distance beyond Hollis the Mountain Man's cabin, and usually survives on soda crackers, tinned fish, spring water (and the occasional wild mushroom or two). Yet he takes a special delight in the orchard run amok.

Hollis the Mountain Man knows this, so he is at first reluctant to permit Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) to go foraging for fruit this fall. "What are you -- crazy?" he asks her. "Here we have all these great places to pick apples -- Lanni Orchards, Brox Farms -- and you want to brave the pricker bushes for a bunch of wormy, wizened mutants." Delia's mouth hardens. She does not like being discouraged. "They're completely organic," she tells him. "Besides, I got a juicer at a yard sale, and I'm tired of juicing carrots. I have a recipe for apple-pear-ginger juice."

Hollis's shaggy eyebrows perk up. His favorite flavor is ginger. He'd eat gingerbread every day and wash it down with ginger ale, ginger beer, or ginger tea if he could. Of course, Delia knows this. She also knows that Lorencz the Hermit probably has been rummaging through the orchard because he hasn't been seen much in town, and he's so odd he really can eat just one thing if it's in season.

The last time Delia and Hollis went to look for him, they found a heap of chewed corncobs outside his wigwam, and the beginning of a pile of peach pits. (You can tell what growing season it is by the variety of organic refuse scattered about Lorencz's various camps.)

"Come on, Hollis," Delia wheedles. "I brought my willow pie basket." Hollis the Mountain Man is like many gruff-voiced, unshaven New Englanders: a dewy, damp sentimentalist underneath the bluff exterior. He knows that Delia's willow pie basket was her 21st birthday gift from her mother, who'd inherited it from her mother, etc. Hollis is a sucker for that kind of story. And, besides, the pie basket isn't very big. He could certainly spare a few fruits for her juicer. Especially if she were to make something out of ginger, which she'd better.

AFTER THRASHING through the underbrush, Hollis and Delia emerge in a small, sunlit grove where the maple seedlings are waist-high, and the apple and pear trees tower over their heads. "Uncle Wilton's father, my great-grandfather, put these in," he explains. "They didn't do much about pruning in those days, so these got pretty wild." Delia looks up. She can see small red and yellow dots above her head, but there are no nearby branches. Suddenly, she yearns for a trip to one of the nearby orchards, where every branch is a graft and grows a crate of apples. But she's on a mission.

"How do we get 'em down?" she asks. Hollis walks over to a tree and reaches in the fallen leaves. He pulls out a 20-foot pole with a garden rake attached to the end. "Wave this around, and they fall," he says. "Uncle Wilton used to climb the trees himself, but when he got old and rickety, this was the only way."

Hollis hoists the pole and maneuvers it into the canopy. Delia hears a rustling overhead and then Hollis yells, "Bombs away!" She screams and darts to one side, and a half-dozen pippins drop to the ground.

"Wait!" she says. "Let me gather these up." She inspects them carefully and finds McIntoshes and some dinged pears. Nearly all the fruit is insect nibbled, but Delia doesn't mind. "I'm just cutting up this fruit to juice, anyway," she says.

"So all the half-worms will just end up in the filter, huh," smirks Hollis.

"Unless I bake them in your birthday cake," Delia responds tartly.

Delia Ellis Bell's

Ginger-Apple-Pear beverage

You need a real juicer for this

Cut up an equal amount of apples and pears for juicing, and grind a half-inch of ginger for every four fruits. A pleasant variation substitutes four carrots for every pear. (N.B.: If you have a juicer, pay no attention to the "health drink" recipes that include ingredients like cabbage, celery, and peppers. Juiced cabbage is like the liquid that forms under the fridge crisper. There's "healthy and nutritious" and then there's "psychotic dietary breakdown" which would include ingesting cabbage juice. Don't go there.)

AFTER AN HOUR of serious tree-shaking, Delia has a picnic basket filled with fruit and a pleasant feeling of moral superiority. Just for kicks, she and Hollis stop by the local Farmer's Market to wander among the bins of handsome hybridized fruit. The Golden Delicious apples have a rosy tint, the white flecks on the McIntoshes sparkle like the Milky Way. Hollis buys a peck of Macouns and a peck of Red Delicious to bring to his great-aunt Winnie. Delia wants to buy apples, but she can't. She has a picnic basket of freebies in Hollis's truck, and the Tritown philosophy says that if you get something for free, why would you pay for it later. Besides, Bronson Alcott and the Harvard Fruitlanders lived on apples and cold water (until winter drove them from their homestead), and their apples weren't perfect, gleaming globes.

She watches Hollis fill his shopping basket. And then another. "You know," he says, passing her to select a bag of Gala Empires. "Just because you're eating organic apples, doesn't mean you can't also eat the farm-raised fruit." He cocks a bushy eyebrow at her. The apples here are 67 cents a pound -- very reasonable. And though they are beautiful, they're still local -- slightly irregular in shape. A convenience store near Delia sells apples for a dollar, and one's the same as another. These farmstand apples aren't organic, but they're definitely real.

Quietly gathering a paper bag, Delia walks down the row, putting one each of Gala, Cortland, Macoun, McIntosh, Golden, and Red Delicious into her bag. Then she reverses direction, until the bag is full. Now she can really do some baking or pan-fry some sliced Macouns in butter as a side for homemade ravioli.

"Excellent idea, Hollis," she says, climbing happily into his truck. "So, are you off to make some juice?" he asks hopefully, putting the truck into gear.

"Eventually, I guess," she sighs. "But with this nice brown bag of Macs and pie apples, I'm more tempted to do some baking."

"Sounds great," says Hollis. Despite other areas of his life completely out of his control (broken chainsaw, difficult coal stove, Canada Geese who want to spend the season at the Mountain Lair), if the arena is apples, he is always going to be taken care of.

Sally Cragin still has hope for crab apples. Yes, that's a pun.


The Tales From Tritown archive


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