Late Season Wisconsin Apples – When Malus Domestica Leads to Heartbreak

A quick trip to the Great White North (not Canada, but close enough) afforded me the opportunity to pick some outstanding apples. Late season Cortland, Macintosh, and Honey Crisp varieties were being picked on this windy and cold mid-October Saturday morning just outside of Merrill, WI at Helene’s Hilltop Orchard. Finding this outfit required navigating back roads and primitive “compass” work (i.e. “Where the hell are we?”) that in the end found is just downwind of a port-a-john and jauntily parked on a hillside overlooking acres of mixed hardwoods hastily dropping their leaves.

Wisconsin is home to a significant apple industry that is, by and large, overlooked on the national level. Home to some 300 commercial orchards and nearly 1 million trees, the state’s crop returns in the neighborhood of 60 million pounds of fruit annually. We were there to do our part in denuding some of the stout little trees of their pectin rich prizes. Believe it or not, they let just anybody wander in to the orchard and grab whatever you want—for a price, of course.
“Just what in the hell is a peck?” Care to venture a guess? Turns out it is 10.5 lbs. of apples, although it remains unclear to me if the term peck only applies to the weight of fruits and not other things such as “a peck of goldfish . . .” or “peck of.38 caliber ammunition.” Yes, I asked. Somehow my sense of humor was lost on the earnest looking attendant hunkered down in flannel and polar fleece behind a flapping plastic windbreak. This folksy weight of measure seems to be a quaint carry-over from our agrarian roots that are often forgotten in the world of pre-packaged products sold in amounts determined by market research nerds.

Like an anxious 19 year-old sailor from Indiana during Fleet Week, I plunged into the rows of trees searching for the most attractive things I could get my hands on. And I was amply rewarded. Peeking out seductively from under every leaf and branch was a tarted-up Jezebel feigning a lusty invitation to be picked first. Not easily lured in (and trying to mask my obvious enthusiasm), I engaged in some heavy petting of the various wares before choosing the right one. Weed-choked alley ways guided me between trees struggling to hold their bounty. The wind whipped their leaves like a bikini-model’s hair and at their bases were countless scattered castoffs, bruised but unbroken, who could not hold on long enough to make the final casting call. My first bite of a shy little Cortland who winked at me with a smirk of sunshine rolling over her curves did me in. The orgy was on.

One of the genetic flaws of human evolution is the fact that at times like this we are only endowed with two hands. For every apple I ate, I tried to pick two. Cortland turned to Honey Crisp and then Macintosh as I wandered in a daze passed mothers and children endeavoring to simply fill bushel baskets and get out of the wind. No doubt I looked the part of an outsider to this wholesome Midwestern fiesta of fruit strolling around without a bag, bucket or bushel basket in hand and clumsily chomping bites of one variety after another. After pausing for yet another smoke break, I realized that the rest of my party was probably beginning to wonder what had happened to me—and they were carrying the baskets, after all—so I reconnected with them and added a few choice Honey Crisps to the collection. My estimate was that several pecks (being a newly informed expert on this unit of measure) had been secured. I was a bit astonished when the rest of the group collectively insisted on cashing out our bounty and finding a warmer den.

The orchard offered a variety of apple focused edibles (what a shocker) in a countrified barn replete with older women in floral printed aprons making pies and pushing apple cider on families with frosty children. Warm, oven-heated air mixed with the appropriate scents of flour, apples and sugar meant that jackets could be unzipped and the final act could unfold. I was satiated from my back-alley orchard encounters, and was more than willing to indulge the rest of the group in sampling some warm baked bites. Would it be pie, turnovers, struedel, or apple butter that now lured us in? This was all good and fine, albeit a bit too much Dollar Store meets Martha Stewart for me, since some food and a warm-up were in order. That is until I happened to notice the apple turnovers being made in the open kitchen . . .

Maybe I was ruined by my whole-hearted digestion of American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen. Or maybe I just lost my way in the foodie fetish of “picking my own” farm-to-table fantasy. Regardless, my disappointment was profound. Right in front of my eyes—and the rest of the huddled masses—was a white pail of processed “Apple Turnover Filling” perched on the end of a prep table and being hastily slopped into pre-made turnover sheets by a pimply teenager with IPod headphones stuffed in her ears. Cue: sound of tires screeching to a halt. . . “What the fuck? An orchard that doesn’t use their own apples?”
Tragic. For all that was “right” with the world on this mid-October day, I realized then and there that there is a sound reason why some are inclined to keep the lights off and the blinds closed when engaging in certain delights. Some things are best left as mysteries. Some mysteries are better when they remain unsolved.

Follow Will Fleischman on Twitter @willfaoro

Maker of Pickles & Rib Jams- Teller of Tales, Bearded Culinary Agitator #Beard

Also see Hello-Hello by Will Fleischman on Beyond the Kitchen (China)