Washington bills itself as ‘the apple capital of the world.’ Its climate is ideal for growing varieties such as Cosmic Crisp and the red delicious. But the apple isn’t native to Washington or even the United States.
Spokane apple historian Dave Benscoter, who has helped to re-discover several older varieties, says the apple was introduced in the U.S. hundreds of years ago.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Dave Benscoter: “Since the first pilgrims arrived back in the early 1600s, they had in their hands millions of apple seeds. The reason they had millions of apple seeds was that their custom in Europe was to grow cider orchards and the reason they grew cider orchards was because the water was so bad.
"That was that way across Europe, and all those people knew just one thing, and that was, don't drink the water. What they came up with was hard cider, and they knew that if you drank hard cider, you didn't get sick, you didn't necessarily get the plague, and this custom followed them over to the United States.
"Although we had pristine drinking water, beautiful streams, they wanted to carry on what they were doing in Europe, which was drinking hard cider. So everybody threw out millions of apple seeds and out of those millions of apple seeds, a very small percentage of the apples were even apples that you would like to eat."
When Americans moved west, they brought their apple seeds with them. Some of the migrants operated plant nurseries.
Dave Benscoter: “What these early frontier nurserymen had was knowledge. They weren't selling cider or apples. They weren't selling seeds. People that came out on the Oregon Trail and then later by train wanted to plant apples that had a purpose, and so the nurseryman was their expert. He could tell him exactly what they needed.
"He'd say, he would say, ‘First of all, you need a few yellow transparent.’ Yellow transparent is great for, first of all, fresh eating. You hadn't had a fresh eating apple for a while, and when you have one, it's pretty important. And then, another thing is yellow transparent is very good for saucing and baking and things like that. It's not the greatest tasting apple in the world, but when you haven't had a fresh apple in a while, it's pretty good. That was July.
"Then they'd hear some August apples that you want to get. Each one of those maybe had a special characteristic that was good and the pioneer nurseryman would point that out. He'd say, ‘Okay, this apple is really good for drying, so you want a few of these trees. And this one is good for baking, and this one is good for long keeping.’
"And so all these apples would be good all through October, and the very last apple was important. That was the Ben Davis. And the Ben Davis had one quality everybody wanted, and that was, it was the longest keeping apple. You could put that in your cellar and put it in a cool cellar and you could still get a ripe, edible apple in April or May. Pretty much most apple orchards had Ben Davis as their main apple.”
Dave Benscoter is the founder of the Lost Apple Project. He has written about his search for heritage apple varieties in his new book, “Lost Apples: The Search for Rare and Heritage Apples in the Pacific Northwest.” Hear our entire interview with him here.
