Randolf, The Red-Nosed Rainmoose

If you are the sort of person who views garnishes with suspicion — that they are being used to hide some deprecation of the food they are meant to enhance, say — then you might be on to something.

The word garnish comes to us from the Proto-Germanic term warnejan, which lead to the Old High German warnon, “to take heed” and from which we have the English warning. The stem of the proto-Germanic word lead to the Old French garniss, or garnir in the 14^th century, meaning “to provide, furnish, fortify or reinforce.”

To garnish, or embellish a dish in the culinary sense dates from 1700, and comes to us English via the sense of outfitting oneself with arms for war.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, you might want to explore some extreme garnishing by turning two innocent apples into turkeys. Be sure to use plenty of lemon juice so they don’t turn brown halfway through!

Garnishing: A Feast For Your Eyes, Francis Talyn Lynch, 1987

Also from this book: Cabbage Christmas Tree, Carrot Fishing Net

Apple Soup

Once upon a time in America the only apples you could find, should you be looking, were gnarly, bitter, wormy crabs. When the first European settlers came over, they brought with them apple trees, but not being used to the new climate and soil, they did poorly. When you bring a brand new plant to an ecosystem you also need to think about how that plant will reproduce. The early settlers hadn’t considered a lack of honeybees for pollination when they packed their ships. So they brought honeybees and different apples and tried again until some survived, and again and again until more survived. Eventually, America had enough apple orchards to make cider for everyone to drink. No-one ate apples back then, as most apples were downright inedible. They made good cider though.

John Chapman, AKA “Johnny Appleseed” would collect apple pips from slush piles outside cider mills in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in the autumn, and float them downriver to establish small orchards along the Ohio, which was then still the frontier. Once the settlers started moving west, and needed apple trees, his were mature enough to sell to them. Over time, the old world apple genes mixed with the native apple genes and produced hardier trees.

The original Golden Delicious tree in its protective cage.  (1931)

Thus did the Apple become American. Once in a blue moon the right combination of genes will produce an apple tree with delicious apples you can eat. This was the case with the original Golden Delicious tree, which grew in Clay County, West Virginia. Every Golden Delicious apple you have ever eaten comes from a clone of that tree.

The ABC of Jiffy Cookery, The Peter Pauper Press, 1961

Circumcised Apples

Well, the one in the foreground seems happy at least.

Microwave Miracles, Hyla O’Connor

Also from this book: 1982, All Wrapped Up, Iron Feng, One Potato, Two Potatoes...

How D'You Like THEM Apples?

Propagation

It is deep midwinter at Woolsthorpe,

and the widow Hannah Ayscough is feeling all askew.

The baby isn’t due but is anxious to be born

so that he may get to work —

and there is so very much to do.

Not on the farm, like his dead father,

but in the classroom, something for which

his laboring mother has no particular regard.

She knows she will have to marry again,

but cannot find a new husband with a child

pulling at her hem. She will give it to her parents,

a remnant of her past they will not be ashamed to raise.

When he arrives, he’s so small he’d fit into a quart jar,

but he thrives. She names him after his father, Isaac Newton,

this boy who should have been the apple of his parent’s eyes.

But apples don’t come true — only grafts make sweet fruit

unless some miracle of God’s handiwork makes it so —

at least, that’s how the thinking goes,

before Watson and Crick undo all His seams and see

that the art of apples lies in the perfect marriage of genes.

Young Isaac will never be a father to anything

other than Calculus, the gravity of which

he is too raw a fresh-born pip to appreciate

on January 4, 1643, as he comes steaming into the world

with his eyes wide open and a snarl curling his lip.

Grafts of Newton’s apple tree can be purchased from Brogdale Farm.

A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, Charles Elmé Francatelli, 1852

Apple Genius

The apple was born in Kazakhstan Silicon Valley millions of years ago in 1976. Chances are that you have never eaten used an apple that has not been created by man, because all edible apples are clones of an original tree. Most other apples computers are wildly unpredictable and leave a bitter taste in your mouth. 

For example, the original Macintosh Apple was discovered built in 1811 1976 by Mr. MacIntosh Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak on his farm in Ontario, Canada in a garage in Cupertino, California. All Macintosh apples are descended from this tree idea, cultivated from grafts prototypes. The original tree died in 1906 2011.

Macintosh Apples, Apple Macs, and everything you can do with them, are insanely great.

Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday Cookery, Ward, Lock and Co., Ltd.

Also from this book: Tess and Cowslips, All This And Rabbit Stew, Brain Cakes, "Gushing entrails bricht", Blackbird Pie, The Empire Bites Back

An Eye For An Eye

Jean Anthelm Brillat-Savarin, in his foundational treatise on the aesthetics and science of gastronomy, The Physiology of Taste, offers this essential aphorism:

A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.

How true that is.

Perhaps this is how the missing eye sees this Apple Pie — deeply red. Look! There’s the cheese imprisoned in a glass cage behind the pie lest it escapes.

Crisco’s Favorite Family Foods Cookbook, The Procter and Gamble Company, 1973

Also from this book: Sausage Breakfast Bake With Crisco, They Serve Coke At Parties, Don't They? 

Sausage Breakfast Bake with Crisco

 Call 911! There’s been a terrible accident! Some poor woman’s fingers were severed during the preparation of this delicious-looking Sausage Breakfast Bake. There they are embedded in the cake. Looks like the misfortune happened as she was pouring the batter and they’ve browned nicely in the oven. I don’t know about you, but nothing gives me a hearty appetite for breakfast like cake slathered in blood.

Oh — wait — it’s not blood; it’s Apple Maple Syrup. This healthy concoction is made thusly:

In a saucepan combine sugar and cornstarch; stir in the syrup reserved from a can of apple slices and cook until thick and bubbly. Stir in butter and maple syrup.

This glorious breakfast tableau comes from Crisco’s Favorite Family Foods Cookbook. This is not a joke. Such a book exists. The main aim is to incorporate as much Crisco shortening into ordinary foods as possible.

Crisco is the type of lard that long-distance swimmers use to slather themselves in to prevent hypothermia (and aid in glide?) when attempting feats of endurance that kill lesser humans, like crossing the English Channel (death by P & O Ferry) or swimming from Cuba to the US (death by shark or Coast Guard). It is not the sort of thing one readily admits to actually ingesting.

This breakfast menu would have you using Crisco in the Sausage Bake and the Sunburst Coffee Cake. The book as a whole would have you slip it into everything you can think of and many things you couldn’t. If you are really lucky, you might actually get through the entire book without having a heart attack (unlikely).

A note on crockery: plates and dishes with inner serrations like the one in this picture are a bitch to clean up. We won’t mention the baked eggs.

Crisco presents Favorite Family Foods, The Procter & Gamble Company, 1973

Also from this book: They Serve Coke at Parties, Don't They?, An Eye For An Eye