Apples in February

December 21 is the darkest day of the year, and yet the days that follow are darker than the ones that preceded it. Which never makes sense, and yet we all know that January through March are winter, the dark brutal days we endure. Autumn in New England being what it is, one of the nature’s great joys, the bitter cold that follows is always hard. February is the longest month, gray and overcast, cold and windy. It is a period we endure. Maybe it’s because as we approach the end of December, there are lights everywhere to keep the darkness at bay. Afterwards, even as the darkness lifts, the lights are removed, leaving us with gray. Fall is behind us and spring is ahead of us, and in the meantime, we soldier on like the good puritans we are.

And in these long days, we eat the remaining apples. The good apples. The perfect apples have been picked and eaten months ago. The local orchards have made their calculations, setting aside fruit to make baked goods and sent to the cidery to be pressed. Those perfect apples that we hold in our minds – admittedly influenced by supermarket crap and artwork of all stripes – are long gone. Eaten months ago. Sure, there are apples in the market shipped in cold storage from half a world away which are, well, bland. But the supermarkets don’t stick them because they taste good. Such apples (and other fruits and vegetables) are grown and shipped from one end of the earth to the other because they don’t bruise easily and ship well. No, real apples come from nearby. Like the foliage it’s easy to take this for granted in New England but we have apples a plenty nearby. And great apples.

At this point in the calendar, though, the stock of apples is running thin. Now we’ve moved onto the fruit where the color isn’t uniform or perfect. The skin is bruised. Cut it open, and they still have flavor. Not what a fresh off the tree one did in October of course, but it tastes like an apple.

My personal preference is for tart, sweet apples. The easiest to find and most common is Granny Smith (which also happens to be a nice baking apple), but there are others like Stayman, Winesap, Braeburn, Cortland. I tend to bake more apple-related items after New Years because the quality drops. Not that I have many apple-related recipes, but a cake here and some scones or muffins there. Honestly until March and it warms up more, I tend not to work out as much or spend as much time outdoors. That plus the cold weather in general means I tend to stop and slow down and use the oven more.

Apples don’t have terroir the way that wine does, but regardless of the varietal, there’s something about local produce. It’s not just hippie-liberal nonsense, as has been suggested by some over the years. It means something. It’s spiritual and physical to eat food that is grown or that lived nearby. We are a part of this place and being nourished by it is not simply metaphor. It tethers us to the land.

A winter apple is something green (or rather, green-ish), something alive. Something to sustain us in the winter months when the ground is covered with snow. At a time when the cold air forces us to huddle in our homes, our dens, in the earth, under the ice, hibernating (or close to) it reminds us of what happened before, what will happen again.

Fruit as flawed as we are. Reminding us that this won’t last forever. And, pricking our finger as the knife slices into the flesh of one, a reminder that neither will we.