Wild Apples by Henry David Thoreau (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

native to

this quarter of the earth,—fruit of old trees that have been dying

ever since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the

woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not

faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the

tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens

to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground

strewn with spirited fruit,—some of it, perhaps, collected at

squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried

them,—some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and

some, especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and

stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the

savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in

past years.

 

I have seen no account of these among the “Fruits and Fruit-Trees of

America,” though they are more memorable to my taste than the

grafted kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess,

when October and November, when December and January, and perhaps

February and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer

in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that

“they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.”

 

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so

much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size,

and bearing qualities,—not so much for their beauty, as for their

fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected

lists of pomological gentlemen. Their “Favorites” and “Non-suches”

and “Seek-no-farthers,” when I have fruited them, commonly turn out

very tame and forgetable. They are eaten with comparatively little

zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them.

 

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine

verjuice, do they not still belong to the Pomaceae, which are

uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to

the cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

 

No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to

make the best cider. Loudon quotes from the Herefordshire Report

that “apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be

preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and

kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords

the weakest and most watery juice.” And he says, that, “to prove

this, Dr. Symonds of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one

hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and

another from the pulp only, when the first was found of

extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and

insipid.”

 

Evelyn [Footnote: An English writer of the seventeenth century.]

says that the “Red-strake” was the favorite cider-apple in his day;

and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, “In Jersey ‘t is a general

observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in its

rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they

exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat.” This opinion still

prevails.

 

All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out

as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are

choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild

apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the

fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a

harsh and crabbed taste. The Saunterer’s Apple not even the

saunterer can eat in the house. The palate rejects it there, as it

does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss

the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with.

Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites

Meliboeus to go home and pass the night with him, he promises him

mild apples and soft chestnuts. I frequently pluck wild apples of so

rich and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a

scion from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full.

But perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my

chamber I find it unexpectedly crude,—sour enough to set a

squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.

 

These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have

absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly

seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their

spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.

 

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it

is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November

air. The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a

different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the

sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the

fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty

weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or

rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming

around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some

of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”

 

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the

taste that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and

perhaps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors. One Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the

Proceedings of the Boston Academy, describing an apple-tree in that

town “producing fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple

being frequently sour and the other sweet;” also some all sour, and

others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree.

 

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuck Hill in my town which has to me

a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells

exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish

it.

 

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in Provence is “called

Prunes sibarelles, because it is impossible to whistle after having

eaten them, from their sourness.” But perhaps they were only eaten

in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging

atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and

clearer?

 

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;

just as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the

middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there,

and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a

chamber, would make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad

are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As

with temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with

sour and sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which

the diseased palate refuses, are the true condiments.

 

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To

appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and

healthy senses, papillae [Footnote: A Latin word, accent on the

second syllable, meaning here the rough surface of the tongue and

palate.] firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily

flattened and tamed.

 

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may

be reason for a savage’s preferring many kinds of food which the

civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man.

It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

 

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of

life, the apple of the world, then!

 

“Nor is it every apple I desire,

Nor that which pleases every palate best;

‘T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,

Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,

Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,

Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:

No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life.”

 

So there is one thought for the field, another for the house. I

would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers,

and will not warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.

 

THEIR BEAUTY.

 

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and

crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming

traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness

dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is

rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting

it on some part of its sphere. It will have some red stains,

commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark

and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days

that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting

the general face of Nature,—green even as the fields; or a yellow

ground, which implies a milder flavor,—yellow as the harvest, or

russet as the hills.

 

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,—apples not of Discord, but

Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.

Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red,

or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed

the influence of the sun on all sides alike,—some with the faintest

pink blush imaginable,—some brindled with deep red streaks like a

cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from

the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a

straw-colored ground,—some touched with a greenish rust, like a

fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or

less confluent and fiery when wet,—and others gnarly, and freckled

or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a

white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who

paints the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside,

perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,—

apple of the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells

and pebbles on the sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid

the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air,

or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and

faded in the house.

 

THE NAMING OF THEM.

 

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the

hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would

it not tax a man’s invention,—no one to be named after a man, and

all in the lingua vernacula?[Footnote: Lingua vernac’ula, common

speech.] Who shall stand god-father at the christening of the wild

apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were

used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in

the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the

wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch, and the

squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and

the truant boy, to our aid.

 

In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society

more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species

which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties

which our Crab might yield to cultivation. Let us enumerate a few of

these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give the Latin names

of