Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

“As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over

me was love. Stay me with flagons,”—undoubtedly of cider!—“comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love.”

If this is the cure of love, we may the better understand why the popular instinct should have resorted to the apple-tree as a cure for ambition, singing,

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree.”

There is, in this toothsomeness of the apple, together with its utter harmlessness, a provision for nurses and mothers. There is a growing period when children are voracious. They must be filled; and it is a matter of great account to know what to fill them with. If you give them but bread, that seems meager. Pies, cakes, and sweetmeats are mischievous; and yet more so are candies and confections. Apples just hit the mark. They are more than a necessary of life, and less than a luxury. They stand just half-way between bread and cake, as wholesome as one and as good as the other.

But now I enter upon the realm of uses, culinary and domestic, where, were I an ancient poet, I should stop and invoke all the gods to my aid. But the gods are all gone; and next to them is that blessing of the world, the housewife. Her I invoke, and chiefly one who taught me, by her kitchen magic, to believe that the germ of civilization is in the art and science of the kitchen. Is there, among fruits, one other that has so wide a range, or a range so important, so exquisite, so wonderful, as the range of the apple in the kitchen?

First, consider it as a fruit-vegetable. It might with great advantage take its place upon the table as regularly as the potato or the onion. Far more odorous is the onion, but, I think, far more blessed is the apple. It is an admirable accompaniment of meat, which always craves a piquant acid for relish. And when meat is wanting, a scrap of pork in the frying-pan, with sliced apples, will serve the economic table almost as well as if it had been carved from a beef or cut from a sheep.

We do not use the apple enough in our cooking. As a fruit upon the table it may be used for breakfast, for supper, for dessert. Roasted apples! Baked apples! What visions come before my mind! Not the baked apples of the modern stove, which has humbled their glory. They are still worth eating, but they have lost the stature, the comeliness, and the romance of the old roasted apples, that were placed in due order between the huge andirons, and turned duly by the careful servant, drinking in heat on one side and oxygen on the other, and coming to a degree of luxurious nicety that will never be attained till we go back again to the old fireplace. It was a real pleasure to be sick,—I mean on the hither border of sickness; so that we might not go to school, and so that, while we took a little magnesia, we might feast on delicious roasted apples. And as for baked apples and milk, how can I adequately speak of that most excellent dish!

Then, again, the apple may be regarded as a confection, serving in the form of tarts, pies,—blessed be the unknown person who invented the apple-pie! Did I know where the grave of that person was, methinks I would make a devout pilgrimage thither, and rear a monument over it that should mark the spot to the latest generations. Of all pies, of every name, the apple-pie is easily the first and chief. And what shall I say of jellies, dumplings, puddings, and various preserves, that are made from the apple?

It might seem hard, in this enumeration of the many forms in which the apple is made to contribute to the benefit of mankind, not to notice that form in which it defies age, I refer to the dried apple. No festoons are more comely than were those half-circles that used to decorate the rafters of the old-fashioned kitchen. I confess that no dried fruit is worthy to be called fruit, whether it be huckleberry, or peach, or pear, or apple. Once dried, these things have lost the soul of their flavor; and no coddling, no soaking, no experimenting, will ever bring them back to what they were in