We had an apple tree in our backyard when I was growing up that gave enough apples for a pie or two each autumn, if you took them all and pared them carefully. The apples were tart and white-fleshed but small, hard, gnarled, and pocked here and there with holes that may or may not have hidden cheerful anthropomorphized worms wearing small green felt archer’s hats like Lowly Worm in Richard Scarry’s “Busy, Busy Town.” In October and November there were apples on the ground back there behind the house, rotting into the earth and giving off a very particular and pleasant smell of cider and fermentation. I can conjure that smell now, out the back kitchen door, reminding me of middle school days and the maroon and gray argyle sweater and gray wool skirt I wore in the fall of eighth grade, bought from the Sears catalog.
The apple tree, which grew bare and gnarled and ended its life as little more than a stump, vanished from the yard many years go, and we replaced that lost tree with a new one that has grown to a decent apple-tree height, but we never do get apples off the new one — and there are no apples falling to the ground and creating an alcoholic autumnal scent — because the squirrels carry them all away. I’ve watched the squirrels do this from the window beside my washer and dryer. They do so with glee. We certainly had squirrels here in my youth, too, and they scampered around the yard with equal daring, but somehow in my childhood those olden-days squirrels didn’t eat all the apples. I don’t really know why the squirrels of today have to eat all my apples, but they never leave me even one. Not one. This is a shame, as I do like to bake a nice pie or brown betty and a nice pie or brown betty is even nicer when you can say, “The apples are from the tree in the yard.”
As I’ve bragged before here in my column, I tied myself into an apron and started forcefully pushing other family members out of the kitchen so I could bake things alone with my thoughts when I was all of 12 years old. I was under the influence of “Anne of Green Gables” and had an unnatural curiosity about antique kitchen implements and the recipes of days of yore. I would lie awake in bed at night reading “The American Heritage Cookbook” and the pamphlet distributed in 1905 by the Knox Gelatin Company. I can remember quite well teaching myself how to “cream” butter with white and brown sugar in a bowl using the side of a fork. The old, crank-handled flour sifter was my dear companion; it squeaked and rasped. My great-great-grandmother’s wide, low-sided ceramic pie dish — yellow and brown earthenware — was a treasured possession. (And as I write this now I realize I haven’t seen that pie dish in a decade or more, and it occurs to me someone must have busted it and been afraid to break the news. It has joined the Disappeared, the household ghosts.)
Well, in the absence of a functional apple tree — and in the presence of a criminal cohort of deer and felonious squirrels who eat everything — fruit, flowers, leaves, sticks, and stems — we can console ourselves that there is still the Milk Pail in Water Mill.
Other states and countries boast of having the best apples, but they do not have the best apples. We have the best apples because we have the Halsey family and the Milk Pail. When I lived in Nova Scotia and the Canadians boasted about the good apples grown in the Annapolis Valley, I was positively affronted: Those were not good apples. They were bad apples. Their texture was a positive offense.
Anyway, I’m here to recommend to you the best thing to do with good cooking apples. Don’t use either Granny Smiths or Red Delicious for this. Actually, don’t use Granny Smiths or Red Delicious for anything, ever. (As a very charming Hungarian man once said to me, in broken English: “I would not touch it with my lips.”) I recommend the Milk Pail’s Empire and the Jonamac varieties most highly, for this and any other purpose. The best thing to do with your spare apples, whether from the Milk Pail or the backyard, is to bake Apple Crisp or Fruit Paradise from page 637 of the 1951 edition of “Joy of Cooking.”
Irma Rombauer (1877-1962) was the white-haired and very stylistically chatty genius behind the “Joy of Cooking” series, and she comments at the top of the Fruit Paradise recipe: “This is the best dessert imaginable when made with good cooking apples.” Quite right, Irma. Here’s what you do.
Peel, core, and slice into a seven-by-seven-inch baking pan or a shallow pie dish: three pounds tart apples, about seven or eight large. The layer of apple slices should be about three-quarters of an inch deep. If the apples are particularly sweet, sprinkle a small amount of lemon juice on top, but not more than a teaspoon or two, and this isn’t necessary; I usually don’t.
In a bowl, work these things together with your hands or pastry cutter: one cup all-purpose flour; one cup brown sugar; a half-cup butter (plus a half-teaspoon salt only if the butter is unsalted); and a half-teaspoon nutmeg. Pat the topping down over the apples and bake at 375 for half an hour. Make sure the apples are good and soft before removing the pan from the oven. Serve your Fruit Paradise with a pour of heavy cream.
This apple dish is humble, but it is also — strictly speaking and factually — the best. Don’t you dare add oatmeal. You can add a teaspoon of cinnamon if you absolutely must, but I advise against it.