Apple information
Hello friends,
I am telling you about apples!
Reader Molly K wanted to know about the apple.
This is one of the best fruits that we tell babies about right away. If you are alive it is time to eat a friggin apple!
Apples come from apple trees, you can grab them right off the branch or maybe pick them up off the ground if they fell off. This is one of those things that first suggested to humans that maybe somebody put all this here for us specifically, which if you don't know nothin about nothin isn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to reach. I forget exactly the science of it but I guess there's sort of male and female trees and in public spaces they've stopped planting one or the other so there isn't free fruit all over the place. I think we can both agree that sucks, even before I tell you the part about how it makes everybody's allergies worse! It would be a lot easier to interpret the world as a place that wants you alive if you could grab breakfast off a tree on the sidewalk. That's how it was back in kings and queens times, but everything else was a lot worse. You had free fruit sometimes but basically every time you went to the bathroom there was a chance you weren't coming back out. Also a lord might be like "that's my tree" and hang you.
Anyways that's the tree element, but I know you're smashing your cups and plates asking HOW DO THEY TASTE??? Well. They taste good sometimes, even though every apple is for sure an apple there's all different kinds so you might go to the store and think I am hungry for fruit - time to treat myself to an apple and accidentally buy one of the kinds that suck shit. The generally agreed upon criteria for a good apple is it's a little tart but not overly so and it's decently crisp when bitten. You want that satisfaction of having gotten something done when you bite into an apple! Some kinds of apples are totally mealy as a rule and I don't understand why they sell them at the regular grocery store. Maybe I have just unknowingly had a weird life full of apple snobs but it feels like the consensus has always been that mealy apples are heinous so how come there's like, five hundred of them at the grocery store? Maybe I'm dreamin' but I feel other fruits at the store are a little more curated to where you aren't buying grapes and finding out oh these are Kringle's Risk grapes, you’re only supposed to use these to make medicine.
The varieties of apples…I know there's fuji, there's Granny Smith and golden delicious and green and red delicious and at least 25 others but I can't keep them and their differences straight. If you are really scared right now I will try to help and say Golden Delicious is generally pretty reliable? If you have a fucked up Golden Delicious it's more the individual apple's fault than the apple type. When you eat the apple you want to rinse it off just in case there is poison on it, which happens, and then you can pretty much just bite into it. It's very appealing for that reason, it's food that you don't have to do very much at all to enjoy! Most people don't eat the core of the apple but I think it's allowed. It has the feeling of if fruit had bones. "wotta concept"
If you want to be so fancy there are ways to eat apples other than just you grab it and start:
SLICES
These can be a very nice snack and helpful if you don't like having a juicy hand. They sell these in a bag sometimes and I just don't know about that. Usually when sliced or bitten into you got a limited window before apples start turning brown so I'm not sure what they're doing to them to prevent that. Maybe it's okay. I hope we're all okay. But it's important to me that you don't make a big fruit mistake and get a disease.
DRIED
You can buy a bag full of many totally dried up apple slices, they taste exactly the way you would want cardboard to if you made a wish for cardboard to be food. Chewy and sweet but with just enough blandness that in the back of your head you're like "I'm being wise right now."
CARAMEL
Welcome to OPPOSITE OF DRIED. Instead of being what a parent gives you to feel superior to parents who give their kids Gushers this is an apple totally coated in candy slime. I think sometimes people mess up their teeth pretty bad on these due to the crispness of apple and stickiness of caramel? Proceed with caution.
APPLE SAUCE
This is the apple you will never hurt your teeth on, it's loads of apples pureed into a sauce that you can straight up drink if you want to. It's the most obliterated an apple gets.
APPLE PIE
Oh baby this is considered a treat symbolic of America and that's an awfully nice thing to say about this fuckin place. It's pretty much just apples and the slime of them inside a pie crust and it tastes great. People have to mess up really bad before they make an apple pie that isn't great. Sometimes you can have this with ICE CREAM???? Decadence.
APPLE JUICE
This is something you drink when you are a little kid and is kind of weird to have as an adult. You drink it and part of you is like guess I gotta learn my shapes.
SPARKLING APPLE CIDER
You should absolutely drink this at thanksgiving time. It's the best thing you could have with that menu as a beverage TRUST ME AND BELIEVE ME PLEASE. Get that martinelli in you!
ALCOHOL APPLE CIDER
I think this might be from like, ancient history but it also is lightly trendy, like people started drinking this a lot around the time I first started hearing the term ethical non-monogamy. Not that the two are necessarily connected, but I wouldn't necessarily call them separate either.
Thank you for reading my big apple email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.
Love,
Ryland Duncan