You can buy a Gravenstein or a Duchess to eat for lunch at your local co-op, but the secret to these uncommon varieties is that they are best for pies.
Some of these apples, like Espopus Spitzenberg and Rhode Island Greening can be eaten out of hand as well as being great pie apples. But others, Bramley's Seedling, Belle de Boskoop and Calville Blanc d'Hiver are mainly cooking apples. You can make pies from combinations of these that are better than you have ever eaten before.
Without knowing the full scientific basis for this claim, I believe that it rests on the fact that many of these apples have relatively high concentrations of acid and tannins that in combination with sugars and other apple flavor elements turn into ambrosia when cooked. A similar transformation takes place when you ferment juice from these types of apples into hard cider, but that is a story for another time.
I could make the case for this proposition in several thousand well-chosen words, but it makes more sense to me to just pass along the apple pie experience that I've garnered over the last (too many) years working on a book about the American apple.
And it isn't just me - in fact, I haven't made that many pies myself. But I have eaten a huge number, and I've been working with what I think of as my pie panel - my wife, although she keeps threatening to withdraw from the field; Pete, an apple pie aficionado of vast experience from Walpole, N.H.; Larry from Norwich, who is a constant threat to win the annual local apple pie contest, and Kerry, my next door neighbor in Burlington, who is just plain a terrific cook.
What I do is check weekly through the season with Zeke Goodband at Scott Farm in Dummerston on what is available. Zeke is the Zen master of the heirloom and uncommon apple world in the northeast. He grows 70 varieties in his 6,000-tree orchard.
I have talked to growers from New Hampshire to Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington, Normandy and Brittany in France and Somerset in southwest England, and I've never met anyone who knew more about apples than Zeke. One or two knew as much, and several thought they did, but Zeke is as good a guide as you're likely to find.
My late father, the best apple pie maker I ever knew, said that the best pie apple was Red Astrachan. They also illustrate the pie apple conundrum: Astrachan and Duchess are wonderful pie apples, but if you want a snack, you might want to try bread and water. Eating them out of hand doesn't exactly take courage, but I try to avoid it.
It's too late now to get Astrachan; in fact, they are very difficult to get during the harvest. The key pie apple in the markets now is Gravenstein. They cost more than ordinary apples, but they are worth every penny.
At City Market in Burlington, the “shelf talker” on the Gravenstein crate contains this description: “A very old apple from Italy. The combination of both tart and sweet flavors makes this a wonderful culinary apple as well as a sprightly flavored eating apple.”
Actually, there is no consensus on the history of Gravenstein. Beach's Apples of New York says that Gravenstein originated in either Russia or Germany, along with Red Astrachan and Duchess of Oldenburg. A footnote in Beach, however, refers to some historical evidence that this variety was imported from Holstein in Germany to Boston in 1825-26 by a Captain John DeWolfe of Dorchester, Mass.; that it was later replanted in Bristol, R.I., and radiated out from there. For our purposes, the key point in Beach is its conclusion: “For culinary purposes (read pie) it is perhaps unexcelled by any variety of its season.”
Over the last five years, the pie panel has made some terrific pies with Gravenstein. Many of those were single variety pies-just Gravenstein. Others had some blending apples, like Duchess of Oldenburg, or for very serious players Dolga Crab. Dolgas are bigger than most crabs, but still very small for an apple - smaller than a golf ball. And coring them takes the patience of an Obama liberal and the small motor skills of a brain surgeon. But if you can get them into a pie, they deliver a terrific apple taste kick.
Then there are the “big four” base pie apples. Belle de Boskoop, a Dutch or German variety, is one of the very best European culinary apples. Holstein is a powerfully acidic apple that I suspected was exactly the kind of apple that would become magical once it was baked into a pie. And according to Pete, it surely did. He gave it a 10 - I don't recall another Pete 10 in several years of panel pie making.
I've found that the optimal formula for a nine-inch pie, admittedly a paltry thing from a size perspective, but not a bad idea if you make a lot of them, is three cups of the base apple, two cups of a powerfully acidic apple like Holstein, and one cup of a sweetie like Lamb Abbey.
Other mixing possibilities: Goodband has sent a variety called Franc Rambour into the markets. It's a terrific eating apple and worth trying in combination with one of the big culinary apples. Sometimes that doesn't work. Paula Reds, now mostly gone by, are good eating apples, but seem to fade in the heat of the oven. In my experience, the most striking example of that phenomenon is an heirloom called Hubbardston Nonesuch.
I ate a Nonesuch one late September afternoon in the Scott Farm orchards a few years ago and it was simply wonderful, one of the best eating apples I've ever tasted. I immediately bought a box and the whole panel made pies out of just that variety. No taste at all, deadly. The panel was in revolt - no more of those, ever.
That's the price of getting back to the roots of the American apple. Some work in pies, some don't. Holstein works as a blend with a great base apple, Dolga Crab does also, Rhode Island Greening (not yet available) is superb. So is Kjarmin de Sonneville, and Cox's Orange Pippin.
One of the most intriguing is an apple I saw in Burlington the other day is Ribston Pippin. The Ribston is a terrific hard cider apple and I have long thought that the powerful tannins and acids in hard cider apples would also play well in pies. I'm going to try that one after the Belle de Boskoop-Holstein mix.
A couple of additional notes. The better the pie apples, the less you need a heavy dose of sugar and spices. Watch the cooking time; it can vary widely based on how firm and juicy the apples are.
Some notes on crust and spices
One of the consequences of the huge loss of varieties in the apple market since the end of World War II has been an over-emphasis on crust in the art and practice of apple pie making. The demands of the mass market reduced the normal supermarket offerings in the east to McIntosh and a few of its cousins and the Red and Golden Delicious, dominant in the west, but ubiquitous in all regions.
In the biz, they are known as dessert apples, bred to be eaten out of hand. Some of them are OK for pies, but many are indifferent to poor because they lack the levels of acids and tannins necessary to stand up to cooking.
With relatively little to work with on the apple side, the dedicated pie maker has tended to focus his or her genius on the crust to distinguish their pies from the competition. A secondary response has been to over-spice the pies. If you can't detect much flavor and tone in the apples, pour on the cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar and dazzle the family with a crust light and flaky as air.
Well, even if you can now get superb pie apples in at least some places in the Northeast - much of the country remains in thrall to the dreadful Delicious tribe - it's worth considering the roles of crust and spices in the whole enterprise. The pie panel is united on the approach to spices - use less of 'em. A lot less. Cut the normal recipe amounts of sugar to one-third - even less. Some use none.
Forget nutmeg. Cut the cinnamon to half or less. I use just a trace. The engine for the pie is the apples, not stuff that comes out of a jar. You could grind up cardboard, marinate it in lemon juice and drench it with sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and get a coated and sugared crust on it and you'd be fully competitive with many restaurant pies. The spice hasn't been invented that can improve on the world's great pie apples.
Larry has devised an inventive way to deal with the spice issue. He puts traces of the spice cohort in the crust, rather than the pie itself. Larry's family likes it that way; they tell him he is so close to the platonic ideal of the apple pie that he just needs to try again-soon. Pete swears by a clove in the pies.
As for the crust itself, some suggestions. My wife has developed a 50-50 mix of leaf lard and unsalted butter for the necessary fat. Lots of people continue to use Crisco - I can't cope with it, it reminds me of Brylcream, a 1950s hair gel for zoot suiters (look it up).
If you don't recoil in horror from lard, make sure you get leaf lard, not the ordinary supermarket stuff. Larry used store-bought lard in some of his pies, and his brother-in-law George thought that he was making the crusts with bacon drippings. That was fine with George, a formidable consumer of pies in whatever format, but I think you really don't need to evoke bacon grease with your crusts.
You can buy leaf lard online. My wife and I get it in half-pint containers from an old German-Dutch firm in Pennsylvania. Leaf lard is the light, lacy fat that encases the organs of the pig. Dead white when rendered, it delivers flaky crust without adding any off flavors.
In service to the flaky crust, my wife uses a technique propounded by the magazine “Cooks Illustrated.” They use vodka for half the liquid in the crust; the vodka does the necessary work of the liquid as the crust comes together, but the alcohol vapors off quickly and the result is a flakier crust.
An interesting idea from Clem Nilan, the major domo at City Market in Burlington: Instead of sticking to all-purpose white flour for the crust, he uses whole wheat pastry flour for half the recipe. He says it gives the crust a warm, nutty flavor without making it heavy. I haven't tried it; I'm going to, but not until I get better at it.
My wife makes terrific crusts, but mine have a sort of armor plating quality to them. Until I can get by the military dimension, I'm sticking to the lightest flour I can find. If you're good, try Clem's strategy.
Finally, if you can't manage making your own crusts at all, try the Betty Crocker pie mix in a box.
The pie panel has nothing to say about those crusts that you buy already rolled out that you just flop on the pie. Larry once lost an apple pie contest on his street to a neighbor who used those crusts in the winning entry. I was visiting and tried all the pies and the outcome reinforced all of my feelings about the vast amount of injustice abroad in the world.