The Balance of Blue Pearmain

Photo Provided by Becky Nelson
Once a year, I seek out my favorite apple in the orchard. We grafted young branches (scions) of the antique Blue Pearmain apple tree that resides at the side of the field in front of the farmhouse (where it has for probably the 200+ years of the farm) onto some modern trees that we planted about 20 years ago. This process took place about 5 years ago as the original apple tree wasn’t looking so healthy and we wanted to preserve the variety.

I wasn’t disappointed. Though the apple had some russeting as many older varieties do, the thick skin gave way to a beautiful, cream-colored flesh that has a bit of a tart zing and a lot of nice, sweet eating. The apple isn’t popular in today’s world, as it isn’t crunchy unless unripe and it doesn’t ever look “perfect”. The blue hue of the skin that gives it its name is a bit off-putting if you don’t know what you are looking at. One of the latest apples to ripen, it was a favorite for winter storage and would help create a beautiful apple pan dowdy or pie in late winter, baked in the wood cookstove that used to live in my grandmother’s house.

The apple always reminds me of that big cookstove for some reason. It went out the door when my parents and we mostly grown kids moved into the farmhouse at my grandmother’s passing. It was a big behemoth of a contraption with lots of doors and nooks for baking bread or baking pies or roasting meats. I don’t remember my Gram ever cooking anything but a pot full of hot dogs on it when the power went out, but my imagination always ran toward the history and the use of things.

But back to the apple. There were a grand total of two apples on the two grafted trees this year. We had just closed the orchard to pick-your-own folks when a gentleman stopped by to see if we had any Blue Pearmain left. He was thrilled to find them in our orchard the year before and told me a story that the Blue Pearmain was a favorite of the naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. In reading Thoreau’s essay “Wild Apples,” I found that not a favorite, but a late fall hidden treasure were his thoughts about the apple. He wrote of scuffling in the leaves beneath the tree to find fallen apples and looking in the nooks and crannies of the branches for apples that might have been trapped and not eaten by birds or squirrels. He wrote of the Blue Pearmain tree by the edge of a swamp: “if I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side, and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance.”

Thoreau was keen on the idea that the history of the apple matched the history of the world. A native in Greece, the apple spread throughout Europe then crossed the ocean to spread across the Americas. New varieties were constantly being created, and the world was always exploding, “improving” and changing, much as it is now…and as our orchards are changing.

With all the honeycrisp, ginger crisps and other elite, modern apples, I am most fond of the old fellas. My beloved Roxbury Russet tree faded away and died, but my Blue Pearmain lives on. Like Thoreau, my Blue Pearmain helps keep me balanced in a whirling world.