Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth

by Alice Morse Earle

When the work was finished, divinations with Apple parings and Apple seeds were tried, simple country games were played; occasionally there was a fiddler and a dance. An autumnal supper was served from the three zones of the farm-house: nuts from the attic, Apples from the pantry, and cider from the cellar. The apple-quarters intended for drying were strung on homespun linen thread and hung out of doors on clear drying days. A humble hillside home in New Hampshire thus quaintly festooned is shown in the illustration [opposite page 208]—a characteristic New Hampshire landscape. When thoroughly dried in sun and wind, these sliced apples were stored for the winter by being hung from rafter to rafter of various living rooms, and remained thus for months (gathering vast accumulations of dust and germs for our blissfully ignorant and unsqueamish grandparents) until the early days of spring, when Apple sauce, Apple butter, and the stores of Apple bin and Apple pit were exhausted, and they then afforded, after proper baths and soakings, the wherewithal for that domestic comestible—dried Apple pie. The Swedish parson, Dr. Acrelius, writing home to Sweden in 1758 an account of the settlement of Delaware, said:—

"Apple pie is used throughout the whole year, and when fresh Apples are no longer to be had, dried ones are used. It is the evening meal of children. House pie, in country places, is made of Apples neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it."

I always had an undue estimation of Apple pie in my childhood, from an accidental cause: we were requested by the conscientious teacher in our Sunday-school to "take out" each week without fail from the "Select Library" of the school a "Sabbath-school Library Book." The colorless, albeit pious, contents of the books classed under that title are well known to those of my generation; even such a child of the Puritans as I was could not read them. There were two anchors in that sea of despair,—but feeble holds would they seem to-day,—the first volumes of Queechy and The Wide, Wide World. With the disingenuousness of childhood I satisfied the rules of the school and my own conscience by carrying home these two books, and no others, on alternate Sundays for certainly two years. The only wonder in the matter was that the transaction escaped my Mother's eye for so long a time. I read only isolated scenes; of these the favorite was the one wherein Fleda carries to the woods for the hungry visitor, who was of the English nobility, several large and toothsome sections of green Apple pie and cheese. The prominence given to that Apple pie in that book and in my two years of reading idealized it. On a glorious day last October I drove to New Canaan, the town which was the prototype of Queechy. Hungry as ever in childhood from the clear autumnal air and the long drive from Lenox, we asked for luncheon at what was reported to be a village hostelry. The exact counterpart of Miss Cynthia Gall responded rather sourly that she wasn't "boarding or baiting" that year. Humble entreaties for provender of any kind elicited from her for each of us a slice of cheese and a large and truly noble section of Apple pie, the very pie of Fleda's tale, which we ate with a bewildered sense as of a previous existence. This was intensified as we strolled to the brook under the Queechy Sugar Maples, and gathered there the great-grandchildren of Fleda's Watercresses, and heard the sound of Hugh's sawmills.

Drying Apples.

Six hundred years ago English gentlewomen and goodwives were cooking Apples just as we cook them now—they even had Apple pie. A delightful recipe of the fourteenth century was for "Appeluns for a Lorde, in opyntide." Opyntide was springtime; this was, therefore, a spring dish fit for a lord.

Apple-moy and Apple-mos, Apple Tansy, and Pommys-morle were delightful dishes and very rich food as well. The word pomatum has now no association with pomum, but originally pomatum was made partly of Apples. In an old "Dialog between Soarness and Chirurgi," written by one Dr. Bulleyne in the days of Queen Elizabeth, is found this question and its answer:—

"Soarness. How make you pomatum?

"Chirurgi. Take the fat of a yearly kyd one pound, temper it with the water of musk-roses by the space of foure dayes, then take five apples, and dresse them, and cut them in pieces, and lard them with cloves, then boyl them altogeather in the same water of roses in one vessel of glasse set within another vessel, let it boyl on the fyre so long tyll it all be white, then wash them with the same water of muske-roses, this done kepe it in a glasse and if you will have it to smell better, then you must put in a little civet or musk, or both, or ambergrice. Gentil women doe use this to make theyr faces fayr and smooth, for it healeth cliftes in the lippes, or in any places of the hands and face."