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Apple Time in the High Country

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Two or three generations ago almost every mountain homestead had apple trees. Whether or not they rose to the status of meriting the term orchard, there would be a goodly variety of trees ranging from the early bearing June apples to late “winter” apples such as Staymans and Granny Smiths. Collectively they provided welcome, indeed needful, additions to the family’s diet. 

One of my favorite vintage photographs of the Smokies shows a cabin in the Bryson Place area of Deep Creek taken early in the 20th century. For the knowing eye one of its most intriguing features is a row of stately apple trees in the foreground.

For reasons lying beyond my ken, old-timers didn’t worry much about disease, blight, and insects. My father often talked about the fact that his family never sprayed their fruit trees. “We had worm-free fruit, and no matter what variety of apple was involved, they’d be sound.” He marveled at those memories from a boyhood spent on Juneywhank Branch in what now is an area of the Deep Creek drainage encompassed by the park, at least in part because the little orchard we had at our place just one generation later required  considerable attention when it came to spraying. 

Many areas of the Smokies and adjoining mountain ranges were well suited to apple tree culture. Cataloochee Valley, deep in the heart of Haywood County, North Carolina, was especially well known in this regard. Today it lies within the park, but apples continue to be an agricultural pursuit of some note in other portions of the county and nearby Henderson County. A poignant memory of apple culture within what became the park came from Swain County’s Winfred Cagle. Interviewed in old age, he recounted how his family had worked unceasingly to clear the woods, remove rocks, ditch the land, plow the fields, build a cellar, and eventually, plant fruit trees. “Now we had … apples of all brands, just about. I guess we had 25 or 30 different varieties … Then somebody come along and say, ‘you got to git out. Got to move. We’re going to take this land and put it into a park.’ Well, at that time people didn’t know anything ‘bout parks. They just knew the people [who] lived on Deep Creek. They didn’t care what was goin’ on out on Larkey (Alarka, in another part of Swain County) an’ down in Georgie and Mexico an’ all them places. They let them people tend to their business and live and be happy, and we done the same thing.”

Bitterness flows through Cagle’s words in a powerful, plaintive fashion, and the manner in which he highlights apples gives an accurate reflection of just how large they loomed in Smokies life. Even today here and there in the park you can still find hardy survivors of trees which once were a staff of life standing as sentinels, lonely and largely forgotten, to a vanishing way of life.

Fortunately, offsetting all the trauma of lost land and orchards, apples remain readily available throughout the high country, and fall pickin’ time finds roadside stands bulging with scrumptious bounty. The apples they offer promise sweetness and a glorious opportunity to savor recipes from the traditional fruit of the mountains.

APPLESAUCE CAKE

Momma always made her applesauce cakes for Christmas during the Thanksgiving holiday. The ensuing month or so would see them stored in a cold area (usually the unheated downstairs bedroom) and periodically anointed with a few tablespoons of apple cider to keep them moist. This combination of aging and moisturizing produced a cake which was, by the time Christmas rolled around and it was sliced, soaked through and through with toothsome goodness. A slice literally glistened with moisture and tasted heavenly.

Add applesauce and remaining ingredients a small amount at a time, stirring by hand as you do so.  Bake for 50 minutes to an hour at 350 degrees. Check with toothpick to see if cake is done.

OLD-FASHIONED APPLESAUCE

To me, real applesauce (often simply styled fruit by mountain folks) is a far superior dish to the insipid stuff which comes in a can or jar from your local grocery store. Momma canned 200 quarts annually, and that translated to applesauce being on our family table with great regularity. The way she made and canned applesauce was the essence of simplicity. She peeled, cored, and quartered apples, often doing several bushels at a time. If she was dealing with a particularly large batch, such as the main picking from our Golden Delicious trees, it was all hands on deck for the peeling and quartering. The prepared apples would be put in a dishpan filled with salted cold water until all was in readiness.

Cooking, usually in the largest pots available, involved nothing more than putting the apples in the container, adding a bit of water, bringing to a simmer while stirring occasionally, and cooking until the quarters had softened or dissolved. A big wooden spoon was used for stirring, and which there were no longer discernible quarters of the apples to be seen, the sauce was ready for processing in quart jars. Sometimes the applesauce would be a bit tart, but no sweetening was added in the cooking and canning process. That waited until a jar was opened and a taste test indicated whether any sugar was needed. Sometimes a hint of cinnamon or honey—instead of sugar—would be used. We often enjoyed applesauce straight from the jar but sometimes heated in cold weather. With a couple of pats of butter melted into the fruit, it was a treat with any meal. 

Canning large batches of apple sauce is still possible, and sometimes orchards or large roadside stands will offer you a special deal on culled, bruised, or otherwise less-than-ideal fruit which is perfectly suitable for canning. Alternatively, you can fix a small batch and store it in the refrigerator. It will keep perfectly well for a week or so.

FRESH APPLE CAKE

For the frosting:

Beat the eggs and add remaining ingredients.  Batter will be stiff.  Bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

FRIED PIES

Every summer both Momma and Grandma Minnie, like countless other mountain women, carefully peeled, sliced, and dried apples and peaches. They were sometimes blanched by burning “just a tetch” of sulfur to keep them from turning brown, but more often than not the fruit was dried just as it was after being worked up. In the case of its use in fried pies, that made perfectly good sense. The reconstituted fruit would turn brown anyway, and once it found the perfect nestling place inside a half moon of crust to form the pie, the cooking process left the filling, if anything, even browner. 

Forget the color though. A fried pie, whether hot off the griddle or eaten cold for a snack as leftovers, perfectly suited the needs of a purt nigh permanently peckish boy. They were sheer bliss and a grand example of how something simple in conception and easily prepared could be a dessert to rival the most delicate crème brûlée or some beastly difficult cake. At any rate fried pies found great favor in my family. 

Also known by such delightful colloquial names as “half moons” and “mule ears,” fried pies were standard dessert fare throughout my youth, and they remain something I regard as toothsome to the nth degree. The only forms I have ever eaten featured fillings of stewed apples, peaches, or apricots, although there’s no reason they couldn’t be prepared out of other dried fruits. In every case the fruit to be used for filling is dried, and in my experience apples were far and away the most common. 

Grandma Minnie never measured much of anything, and other than regular kitchen spoons and possibly a cup with markings I don’t think she even owned measuring utensils. But as nearly as I can approximate her ingredients (and this is what Momma wrote down), here’s Grandma’s recipe. Although she was a masterful baker, this was the dessert she produced most frequently, and whenever it came straight from her griddle to my plate, I had a pat of butter waiting to adorn it before introducing the finished product to what was, in this case, my aptly named “pie hole.”

Cover the dried fruit with water and allow to soak overnight.  Drain any extra water and cook slowly until completely tender, mashing the fruit as it cooks. Then stir in the other ingredients, perhaps cutting back on the sugar a bit depending on personal tastes and factors such as whether the dried apples, if that is the fruit being used, were sweet or tart. Allow to cool while making the crust. Use a bit less shortening than you would for a regular crust (Grandma used home-rendered lard from the hogs we had killed in the fall).  Roll out thin with a rolling pin and then cut in circles. Grandma always got perfect circles by using a suitably sized saucer to make an imprint then cutting around the resultant image with a handy little gadget she had for that purpose. Once the crust is ready, add fruit to half of the circle of crust, fold and use a fork to crimp and seal the edges, and pop into the pan or atop a griddle.  Fry in piping hot lard, just enough to prevent sticking, and turn only once. Drain on paper towels and serve while still warm.  If desired, you can sprinkle each pie with cinnamon or cinnamon sugar.  Fried pies warm over quite nicely, and they also make a wonderful dessert for a hunter’s field lunch.

We ate stacks of these delicacies, and they are almost as good left over, whether re-warmed or eaten cold, as when just out of the frying pan. On days when I hurried home to go squirrel hunting, I would tuck two or three fried pies carefully wrapped in wax paper into a pocket of my Duxbak jacket. Munching one while meditating and waiting quietly for a bushytail to appear was pure heaven, and safe or not I washed them down from mountain springs without a second thought (or any harm). They were also most welcome during our mid-day break when on wintertime rabbit hunts. For me, at least, those were truly the days.

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