How To Eat: Apples | Fruit | The Guardian

Have you ever found yourself flummoxed by the question, “How do you like them apples?” Would it trigger an existential crisis as you realise, in a rising panic, “Actually, now that you mention it, I don’t know. Why have I never thought about it? What do I think about them apples?” If so, then you are in the right place. This month, How To Eat – the Guardian blog that analyses the best way to enjoy Britain’s favourite food stuffs – is considering the apple, a fruit so powerful that it occasioned man’s Biblical fall from grace, is central to America’s mythic self-image and, of course, connects the Wurzels, William Burroughs and Mr Kipling. Below the line, please get to the core of your argument quickly. Prevarication will give your fellow contributors the pip. As will any unnecessary aggression. “It makes you look,” as my Granny Smith used to say, “like a bit of a Cox.”

To wash … or not?

Apparently, apples are among the top three fruits when it comes to retaining pesticides (yay, go apples!), which probably – hey, if you came here looking for hard science, then you are reading the wrong blog, friend – means you should give them a rinse. I give any apple I eat a quick rub on my T-shirt … if I remember. This is probably shaving minutes off my life, but isn’t everything?

Peel deal?

There is no reason why anyone over the age of five should want an apple peeled and, even then, you should not pander to the little darlings. In discarding the skin you lose most of the apple’s free radical-fighting flavonoids (if you are into that kind of thing). But, perhaps more importantly, it ruins the flavour of the apple and you miss out on that exquisite pleasure of piercing that cool, taut skin with your teeth. That repeated crisp-crack as you work way around the apple is one of the most sensually and sonically satisfying aspects of eating an apple. If you do not like that then, frankly, you do not like apples. You need to stick to bananas or mangos. There is no shame in that. Apples are not the only fruit.

Chilling out

Broadly, storing fruit and vegetables in the fridge is, at best, a necessary evil and, at worst, a culinary crime. For instance, refrigeration kills tomatoes. It, and this is true of all fresh items, inhibits the activity of the volatile chemical compounds that produce flavour. But, and it is a big but, there is something so refreshing about a cold apple straight from the fridge that it trumps what you lose in flavour. A good apple should slake the thirst as effectively as a pint of iced water.

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Variety … and the spice of life

Theoretically, it would be nice to be able to buy more of the 2,000 or so apple varieties that once thrived in Britain, such as the yorkshire goosesauce, blenheim orange and egremont russet (or was that a now-neglected Victorian novelist?), but harrumphing about it will not change anything.

Fundamentally, in recent decades, the apple choice in Britain could be broken down between: deeply unpleasant and deeply boring. Apples were something to be endured rather than enjoyed. In the 80s, there was still a macho cachet in eating unpalatably acidic apples on a spectrum from rock-hard granny smiths to hulking great knobbly cooking apples, in their abrasive, bark-like skins. Waste not want not and all that. Meanwhile, the big-hitting commercial alternatives, golden delicious and red delicious, were and are so dull that, but for the mechanical movement of your jaw, you could forget that you are eating one.

People still hymn, with some justification, the complexity of the cox’s orange pippin, which is, variously, credited with spice-like, honeyed and subtle tropical fruit flavours, but how often have you eaten a genuinely outstanding one? Most commercially grown cox’s/variants offer no more than a brief, watery echo of that historic intensity. Things changed when those sweet and juicy, downright apple-ier Antipodean varieties such as braeburn, jazz, gala and Pink Lady (a brand name for the cripps pink variety), started to arrive in the UK and rapidly established themselves as the market leaders. And why not? Raymond Blanc may rail against the “mono flavour” of modern apple varieties, but, frankly, how much acidic complexity do you want in an apple? Generally, people do not eat tart foods in isolation. They are ingredients, not snacks. The idea, moreover, that sweeter apples are, somehow, infantile or that their rise is a damning manifestation of Britain’s deleterious sweet tooth is patronising and misleading. Some acidic apple varieties contain more sugar than their sweeter counterparts and, hell, what is wrong with that sweetness anyway?

Pink Lady et al are perfectly balanced. The bitter tannins in their skins gently offset that burst of sweet, chin-dribbling juiciness from their just-soft-enough flesh which, albeit not as dramatically as some heritage varieties, delivers a more variegated range of fringe flavours (melon, pear etc), than its critics would like to admit. Such apples also tend to be smaller, which means eating one does not turn into a chore.

We are where we are, and where we are is a world in which, as a general rule of thumb, the pinker and smaller the apple, the better it tastes. The bigger and greener they, are the best they are avoided.

Core values

There are some people who chomp through the whole apple, core and all, without a second glance. For some, this is habit, for others, a matter of principle – they want to minimise food waste. But you have to draw the eco-line somewhere. And eating that woody, unpalatable core is both bizarre from a taste and texture point of view and, of course, highly dangerous. Not because of the amygdalin in apple seeds which, when digested, release (a harmless trace amount of) hydrogen cyanide, but because, as your mum should have told you, if you swallow those seeds, an apple tree will grow in your belly. That is A Matter Of Medical Fact. Ask any doctor.

When

Eating (as opposed to cooking) apples are technically referred to as dessert apples, but does anyone really consider an apple a “treat” after a meal? No, of course not. Apples are an everyday snack food to be eaten between meals when you need something sweet but virtuous to fill a hole and pep you up around 11am or 3pm.

Not near me

The apple is the ultimate mobile handheld snack. It can be eaten anywhere – train, office, street – and at any time, one-handed, while completing other tasks. For those of us who find listening to other people eat unbearable, this is horrifying. The apple is not only everywhere, but it is also one of the loudest sources of gustatory noise pollution. Prior to writing this piece, I was unaware of the condition, misophonia. Its sufferers are, apparently, brought to a state of high anxiety by intrusive noises – I fear I may be a sufferer. Those with a low tolerance of background noise are also thought to be (cough!) hyper-intelligent. For the record.

Drink

Nothing. What is an apple but apple juice in solid form? This is not thirsty work. Moreover, most drinks, from water (which leaves the apple tasting bland and mealy) to wine (an unholy clash), taste vile with an apple. Have you ever drunk tea with one? Lord knows what is going on there chemically, but it creates a whole world of astringent wrong.

So apples, how do you eat yours?