Ode to an Heirloom

At the apple orchard where I used to work, autumn’s encroaching frenzy had the most unassuming harbinger. One day in early August, a ladder would appear in a solitary old tree by the driveway, followed in the apple barn by some crates of pale green apples striped with cotton candy pink. I never quite knew who put the ladder there and picked those apples, but it was the starting gun for a helter-skelter season of picking, sorting, juicing, and selling apples. We’d catch our breath around Christmas.

That lonely tree stood apart from the rest of the orchard—its companions had long since died—as a sentinel from a bygone era. It was the orchard’s only remaining Liveland Raspberry, which is not in fact a berry, but a variety of apple—named after its country of origin, a former Soviet province. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because the Liveland Raspberry is one of more than 10,000 varieties of heirloom apple grown in the United States.

A mystique surrounds heirloom apples. Some people drive across state lines to seek out rare varieties; others dedicate their lives to preserving them. Their price reflects the mystique: At my local food co-op, the heirlooms are twice as expensive as the other apples. The word “heirloom” basically means “old,” but it’s taken on some broader, ethereal meaning to many people: novelty, obscurity, nostalgia, and maybe even superiority. For some people, heirlooms can ascend to become the object of a grail quest: the dream that we can bring the past back to life.

The irony in all this is that many heirloom apples aren’t actually that good. Take that lonely Liveland Raspberry: There was a reason the orchard was down to a single tree and more hadn’t been planted. Eaten out of hand, the Liveland’s texture is tough and its flavor is uninspiring. It’s better for cooking, but it’s still not as good as other apples in our August lineup. So, the Livelands generally withered in the cooler until some day in October, when we’d find them buried under a pile of crates and dump them all into the cider press. This was an annual tradition as consistent as the appearance of the phantom ladder. In this case, “heirloom” served as code for “relegated to history’s compost bin.”

Is there a way to peer through the ephemeral mist, to understand not only whether heirlooms are worth the hype, but what heirloom diehards are truly searching for?

I spoke with some growers who have devoted their lives to heirlooms to see if they could break the spell and help me understand the true value of an heirloom.

“I think an heirloom has to have a little bit more going for it” than just its age, says Dan Bussey, author of The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, which catalogs and describes 16,350 varieties in seven volumes. “It needs to be something that had a life someplace—that was popular, people liked it. It has to have some value other than just being old.”

Interestingly, the value of an old apple can actually be its newness. I once sold apples to a couple who were looking for heirlooms. I offered them samples of such ancient varieties as Golden Russet, Wealthy, and Tolman Sweet, before they tried a Melba and fell in love. I tried to explain that Melbas, the product of a Canadian breeding program, were not technically heirlooms, but they had none of it. They had tasted mana and wanted five pounds, thank you very much.

That couple was using “heirloom” in a way that many people do, which is to mean “obscure.” So, there’s no small irony that one of the world’s most well-known apples, the McIntosh, easily meets any definition of an heirloom, having been discovered as a seedling by John McIntosh on his Ontario farm in 1811.

Many people know the McIntosh as a soft, mealy apple, and they despise it. Yet, there’s a small club of us for whom the Mac represents the archetypal apple. Imagine scouring a tree for an apple that’s hung on long enough to turn bright crimson, so ripe that it falls off right into your hand; biting into its crisp, snappy flesh, the juice’s tartness cutting through the last heat of summer, its incomparably rich flavor transporting you, if only for a moment, into reverie.

But blink, and you could miss that moment. The problem with the McIntosh, like many heirlooms, is that it doesn’t store particularly well. Within as little as a week or two after picking, a Mac may begin to lose its perfect crunch. And considering that the average apple on a supermarket shelf has been in storage for eight months, by the time your average apple-eater encounters a McIntosh, September’s sweet-sour snap has given way to the mealy mush of May. Today’s apples need to function in a system of international commerce, and they need to look presentable 12 months and 12,000 miles from their time and place of origin.

The McIntosh has other traits that bedevil its growers—Macs bruise easily, are especially susceptible to the fungal disease Apple Scab, and tend to fall off the tree before they’re fully ripe. Modern apple breeding programs have worked to eliminate these nuisances.

When the needs of the grower and grocer eclipse those of the eater, then your supermarket apple boasts a bright, shiny skin that cloaks blandness and fatigue, and sends apple enthusiasts looking elsewhere.

However, if this sentiment becomes overblown, then heirlooms can become code for “snobbishly superior.” In this case, the apple’s worth is predicated on its rarity, which makes ubiquitous apples, like the McIntosh, inherently worthless.

I asked the orchardists I interviewed whether there were apple varieties that weren’t good enough to deserve preservation. C.J. Walke, who manages the Maine Heritage Orchard, believes that’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, it’s important to look at the function of heirlooms in a robust local food system and regional economy. “If we go back 100-plus years, a lot of these varieties were grown on the farm or on the homestead, and they served a purpose for that family’s needs,” says Walke. Some were sold, but many were consumed right there by the family, eaten fresh or preserved as applesauce, cider, or vinegar. Heirloom varieties are so numerous because each fits a niche for every particular farm family, in terms of flavor, function, seasonality, and cold tolerance.

When I asked the orchardists why customers come to them looking for heirlooms, the reason that came up again and again was nostalgia.

“Their grandma had this tree, or their parents had this tree, and they haven’t seen it in 40 years,” says Jamie Hanson, the orchard manager at Seed Savers Exchange. “And so, for them, it’s a very personal experience.”

The richness of those memories drives the orchardists’ passion for their work.

“What moves me is how many generations of people loved these varieties,” says Erin Robinson, Orchardist at Scott Farm, in Dummerston, Vermont. “I am a link in that chain. I feel like it’s my duty to preserve them.”

Indeed, there’s something about apples that makes us look towards the past. Heirlooms hold the promise that there was once a richness that has been lost in the glossy monotones of the supermarket, and a diversity that met each individual’s particular need.

What excites Dan Bussey about heirlooms is their specificity, that a person can find something that fits their exact tastes. “I like everything to be a democratic process, where we all get a chance to try something, and if we love it, we should share it,” he says. “We should make it available to anybody. And if we like growing old varieties, great. If we love growing new varieties, wonderful. It’s what you like. That’s the important thing.”

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