There will no doubt be apple pie on the menu at many July 4 celebrations this year. There is every year. This quintessential American fruit, however, has varying cultural weight in different regions of the country.
That's according to folklorist Lucy Long, author of the new book, Sweet, Tart, & Golden — Apples in the Midwestern Imagination, just out from the University of Illinois Press.
Long said in this part of the country, apples are so ingrained, they help define the Midwestern identity even as they're viewed as a national symbol — as American as apple pie.
“People would say apples, they're straightforward, they're simple. What you see is what you get…They’re honest,” said Long.
In point of fact, apples are not American at all. They originated in central Asia and made their way to North America via Europe after thousands of years of cultivation.
There are apples in many regions of the country. Long said paradoxically that reinforces the Midwestern claim to this piece of Americana.
“The fact that apples are found in other places proves their point that they are All-American. It's one of the contradictions I started noticing, that there actually are distinctive traditions here, distinctive meanings that are given to apples and apple food ways in this area of the Midwest, that people tend to think that they're shared by all Americans,” said Long.
Johnny Appleseed
She said Johnny Appleseed is probably the most obvious example of a uniquely Midwestern apple-related icon. When Long moved to the Midwest, she thought Disney invented John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, that he was not a real person.
There are still the stereotypes that he wore a pot on his head, dressed in rags, and could talk to animals. He was a businessperson who had commercial reasons for orchard planting in the Midwest.
“When I would talk to people about the memories, the emotions that they might attach to Johnny Appleseed, a lot of them…said they admired his entrepreneurial spirit,” said Long.
While true, Long said that particular quality to revere grew in the 1950s and ‘60s.
"He didn't live the standard expected life of a middle-class entrepreneur. He never married. He didn't settle down and have a family. He didn't have a house in one place.
"He frequently slept outdoors. He didn't seem to care about his appearance. So, apparently, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there were some people who thought he looked too much like a hippie, and they discouraged the celebration of him. So, some people started emphasizing the entrepreneurial part of him,” said Long.
She said Chapman is back in the popular imagination as a more complicated individual. He was religious, spiritual, and philosophical, well-read though he did not have extensive education, and at the same time he was entrepreneurial in that he knew where people were going to settle, so he would go in and plant seeds and come back several years later.
“It was very important to cultivate apple orchards to show that people were taming the wilderness. They had to prove they were living on their homestead by cultivating orchards,” said Long.
Apples were an integral part of foodways, and necessary to survival on what was then the northwest frontier.
Johnny Appleseed’s practice of planting trees from seeds illuminates a political and spiritual debate of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Most orchards were grown from grafts onto apple rootstock. Planting a seed does not necessarily guarantee the new tree will be the same kind as the tree that produced the apple.
“One apple seed can contain the DNA of any apple variety at all," said Long. "So, if you grow an apple tree from seed, you never know what kind of apples you're going to get.”
Chapman belonged to a sect that viewed grafting as hubris, overturning the natural order by playing God, Long said.
“It was a huge debate, and people were getting [in] fist fights over whether or not you should graft not only apple trees, but trees of any kind,” she said.
There also was an economic reason to use seeds, she said. It was far less expensive and labor intensive to buy pulp and seeds from cider mills than it was to build an orchard through grafting.
Apple butter
Another uniquely Midwestern apple tradition is the making of apple butter. In the Midwest, it was an expression of community and is still celebrated that way at apple butter festivals.
“Apple cider is boiled down in a large copper kettle over a fire outside. It usually takes two or three days of stirring and then apple pulp is added to that after it has boiled down,” said Long.
In other regions of the country, apple butter is more like applesauce that's cooked down. Long said the big pot version is a distinctive recipe that goes back to the Pennsylvania Germans and Germany.
You could make apple butter the Pennsylvania Dutch way in other regions of the country, but Long said families in other areas emphasized other traditions. Her father’s family in the Appalachian Mountains made sorghum molasses for their big festival event. Other areas of the country emphasized hard cider, another way to preserve apples.
Parts of Colonial America were dependent on hard cider as the primary beverage, partly because the fermentation would kill bacteria. It was considered safer to drink than water, and it did have nutritional value.
“All the founding fathers talked about how hard cider was part of their dietary regime…It was not as prevalent in the South because warm weather turns hard cider into vinegar,” said Long.
Long noted there’s heavy German settlement of the Midwest and beer was more popular than hard cider in that culture. Cider also ebbed as a cultural tradition starting during the temperance movement. In the late 1800s, people ripped out apple orchards that were specifically for cider.
The vestiges of cider culture in the Midwest, she said, turned into fresh apple cider.
Industrial apples
One of Long’s big surprises in writing the book was how processed foods saved the apple industry in the 1970s and ‘80s. There was a scare about the safety of alar used to enhance the growth and appearance of apples. Apple consumption fell.
“The apple industry was actually rescued and saved by sliced apples. They started being produced and sold in supermarkets and school lunches, fast food places,” said Long.
Sliced apples also are easier and less messy to eat than whole apples, she said, adding slices "changed the whole industry and created all these new markets that had not been there before.”
In her book, Long quotes clergyman Henry Ward Beecher from 1859: “Apples are a democratic fruit.”
Perhaps that’s fitting as the nation celebrates Independence Day.
