Adam's Apples

On a cheerful Wednesday in mid October, a friend and I took a detour on our way to farmers market and visited Baldwin Common in Wilmington, Massachusetts. There we paid our respects to the man who popularized the Baldwin apple.  ¶  Baldwin is a great apple , once the most celebrated in New England and perhaps America.  ¶  They are ripe in mid October. A farmer at our weekly market grows them.

I've got two Allington apples today: one large, the other slightly smaller. They are classically shaped, long stemmed and nearly unribbed.  ¶  The apples wear a semigloss skin of yellow that is almost a spring green, with a partial red blush that comprises darker red steaks and specks in an orange wash.  ¶  There is some russet in the mix around the stem well, but the kind of textured, subdued olive-toned red you can see in my photos is mostly just the thin blush, with its streaks and spots, spread over the underlying green-tinged yellow.

Darkness falls in America early this month as we set our clocks back an hour for Daylight Savings Time.  (Photo:  Electric lighting illuminates the apples at the Davis Square farmers market in Somerville, Massachusetts, earlier today. )  Night was falling at 5 pm at farmers market in Davis Square (Somerville, Massachusetts) today. You could have bought 14 different kinds of apples there.

The sticker of the day graces a lovely Stayman Winesap .  ¶  See closing times at the polls for every American state and territory.

My Sops of Wine are pretty, medium-sized apples with a streaky red blush over yellow.  ¶  They are oblate, modestly ribbed, and decorated with tiny light-tan lenticel dots .  ¶  I reviewed Sops of Wine in 2013, then had  another bite , not as good, just two years ago.

The suburban farmers markets end on Halloween. Today's in Belmont was the last until June.  ¶  Urban markets continue until Thanksgiving.

Today's Knobbed Russet is neither.  ¶  The twisted, glowering Knobbed Russet I reviewed in 2011 is more characteristic. I was strongly tempted to reuse its photo to show some of the deformity this variety can achieve  ¶  This Knobbed Russet has a reputation of being covertly tasty, a connoisseurs secret. It was the failure of my 2011 samples to meet that standard that made me especially pleased to try again. Today's apples are a pale gold, one with a small orange glow of a blush, both with fractal zig-zags of a rough brown russet.