Fruit Slinger

In the cocktail party that I'm hosting in my head, I serve cider and Calvados along with canapés of quince paste and Spanish cheese (probably Mahón curado).

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Michael Pollan's book "The Botany of Desire" — highly recommended reading for anyone interested in apples — is now a two-hour PBS program. It's airing tonight.

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From the archives of The Atlantic magazine comes an article about apples by Corby Kummer. (Hat-tip to Jessica for the link.):

People travel from remote wooded parts of Maine (which is to say most of it), the state where [John] Bunker has lived for 40 years, to present him with orphan apples from trees on their property. Like found pets, the neglected trees seem to beg for adoption. Someone once planted and pruned them, and taught succeeding generations how to tend them. But then a link was broken, and the apple lost its name. Now visitors line up at country fairs to ask Bunker the name of their apple, and in the winter months boxes come in the mail bearing more mystery apples from all over the Northeast, for a total of 300 apple challenges a year.

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In this brief New Yorker piece by Lizzie Widdicombe, a few apple trees give their life for art:

[Jennifer] Rubell, who is thirty-nine, was in her car, driving to the North Fork of Long Island to pick out a critical part of the dessert course: three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches. Rubell acknowledged that some people might find it disturbing to eat fruit from a chopped-down apple tree.

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God, I must be, like, one of the worst fruit bloggers. Fortunately, because of the narrow niche I occupy, I can also tell myself that I am one of the best fruit bloggers. Now you know what's written on my bathroom mirror. Wait. Not that whole thing. Just the last part. Anyway, I write two posts about quince without explaining what the hell a quince is. I am willing to bet that the average reader of this blog (perhaps a contradiction in terms, I concede) already knows what a quince is, but I don't want anyone left behind.

Fortunately, David Karp is, like, one of the best fruit detectives. In this piece for the LA Times, he spells out the past and present of the quince.

I don't want to give anything away (spoiler: I'm about to give something away), but DAVID KARP GETS A QUINCE NAMED AFTER HIM and he is so bad-ass that he just tosses that off tangentially.

If I ever get a fruit named after me, you are never hearing the end of it.