![]() The International Association of Culinary Professionals, announced its 2012 finalists last week. All rights reserved.It's the awards season in the food world, just as it is in film and music. Used with permission of the publisher, W. Photographs copyright 2011 by Squire Fox. Recipes and photographs from The Apple Lover's Cookbook: Revised and Updated. Whether traditional or modern the results will be the same. No matter how your family celebrates the holidays this fall and winter, consider incorporating an apple dish. With nine choices there was more than I needed, and the results follow. Taking her at her word, I went to a regional store, reference chart in hand and she was absolutely right. I often say that while some apples work better in certain ways, any apple pie is better than no pie!” She replied that one can “walk into almost any grocery store and find what you need. I mentioned that I live in an area without gourmet groceries, as I was concerned that I would not find the apples specified. “They are so amazing they have such great history and have survived for literal centuries.” Yet it is the heirloom apples that remain Traverso’s favorite. This book includes 11 new apples such as Opal and Cosmic Crisp, as well as 10 new recipes to reflect their use. “For many farmers this is a life’s work, planting acres of trees to test and ripping out most to start again until they get consistent fruit - an effort that can take four or five years,” she said. To be commercially successful, each new apple needs to demonstrate a “perfection of taste and performance.” Traverso calls these new apples “thoroughbreds” because they must have pronounced taste, bright acidity, a resistance to browning and can be kept for a long time. Gala and Pink Lady came to market back in the 1970s, but with the highly successful introduction of Honey-crisp in 1996, more apples are now being tested each year. “They are coming faster than they used to,” she said. One of the reasons Traverso updated the book was the introduction of new varietals. But then there are the bins and bins of varietals of apples, and you have everything you need to make just about anything.” “In a typical supermarket there’s a bin called “lemons” and another called “grapes” - usually one choice for each. “It’s a glass half-full thing,” she said. Traverso, who is the senior food editor at Yankee Magazine as well as a host on the TV show Weekends with Yankee, has long been in love with apples. While I tested two desserts, there are main dishes, sides, cider, condiments, and cocktail recipes to keep any apple lover busy. There’s even a Cheat Sheet to refer to when planning a dish.Īnd all that comes before more than 100 recipes personally tested by the author. The gem of the book may well be the “Apple Primer”, which sorts nearly 80 varietals into Firm-Tart, Firm-Sweet, Tender-Tart and Tender-Sweet, allowing the cook to match the best apples to each recipe. Providing some insight, Traverso writes that a “seedling will be even more distinct than a human child because apple genetics are mindbogglingly complex.” Instead, through pollination, trees exchange DNA with native crabapples. The fruit is extremely adaptive, but you can’t just plant a seed. The section “The Wild World of Apple Genetics” is a short but fascinating chapter on how apples are grown. (Its origins date back before recorded history, to the southeast corner of Kazakhstan along the Tien Shan mountain range where ancient groves still grow.) ![]() ![]() Really, it’s a compendium of all-things-apples, starting with a brief history of the apple, which was brought to the United States by the Jamestown settlers. Which is why I was so excited to find the newly-released second printing of Amy Traverso’s The Apple Lover’s Cookbook.Ĭookbook is a bit of an understatement. Nothing says “the holidays” like apples, and no dish calls to me more than apple pie.
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