One September night I awoke abruptly. Something had gone bump in the night. I heard it again and thought, "That's the sound of my cat jumping down from my desk." Then I heard it again, louder, and I thought, "And that's the sound of—a bear in my apple tree!" I flung the covers off, scampered down the ladder, and dashed to the deck just above the apple tree. A big lack bear—a big, bad, black bear—was lumbering around on the lower deck under the tree. I yelled angrily at him, and he fled like the guilty thief he was.
Mine are the most delicious apples in the world, blemish-free, completely organic, as large as grapefruits, juicy, yellow-green, and tart-sweet. Every day for lunch I pick an apple and eat it with cheese and dates. I wasn't about to let a bear eat my crop or ruin my tree. He had gotten half the apples that night and had broken four branches. About two dozen apples remained. These, I vowed grimly, would be mine.
My neighbor told me to shoot a gun after him—not to hit him, but to scare the veejeebers out of him. "He knows that sound," Joe told me, handing me his shotgun. "He'll never come back if he hears it." I took the gun a little reluctantly. I have shot a gun before, with my brother and his friend in Georgia. They showed me how to hold the rifle, how to aim, how to shoot. Then we took turns shooting at the target. To everyone's surprise, I was a crack shot. Again and again and again I hit the bull's eye, impressing the socks off the two guys. Finally my bother put a bottle cap on a tree trunk. Whoever hit the cap first, he said, would end the shooting for the day. I tried and missed. Jeff missed. Lee missed. On my next shot I hit the cap square in the center.
So I took Joe's shotgun, but I didn't really want to use it. Later that day the bear came round again, but as soon as I opened the door, he was off through the woods. The gun was next to the door. "All you have too do is pick it up and shoot it after him," I told myself, but I didn't. That might I dragged the foam pad off my couch and squeezed it onto the upper deck between the flower boxes and the side of the house. I laid my sleeping bag on it and snuggled in. The air was delightfully sharp. The stars sparkled brilliantly through the trees until the moon, just past fullness, came over the mountain with a glaring white light. I wondered why I didn't sleep out there every night. Before I went to sleep, I glanced reassuringly at the apples hanging just out of reach. I was their heroic guard.
On the third night the bear returned. I heard him come up through the woods then stop. I didn't have to see in the dark to know that he had risen on his hind legs and was sniffing the air. He knew I was there, and passed by.
The next night I had to leave the house for a yoga class and would be gone at least four hours, plenty of time for the bear to eat his fill. The time had come to harvest the remaining crop. Regretfully, I did. I gave apples to friends. I sent a box to my son and daughter-in-law in Seattle. I mailed four apples to my sister in Georgia, making them, at a cost of $2.00 per apple, the most expensive apples in the country. I put the rest in a cooler on the back porch and returned the gun to Joe.
But wait a minute. The cooler is outdoors. Bears have the most powerful smelling apparatus in the animal kingdom. Could a bear smell apples inside a cooler? If I wake up in the middle of the night hearing something go thump on the back porch, I'll be out there in a jiffy, and then I'll spend every night sleeping on the back porch until, one day at a time, I've eaten all my apples. That's the kind of thing a heroic apple guard will do.
Next week: "Ice Cream Made the Old-fashioned Way"
Recipes from this post:
Some favorite ways to eat apples
Waldorf salad
Ordinary apple pie
Apple pecan upside down pie
SOME FAVORITE WAYS TO EAT APPLES
(1) Just picked off the tree, apples are good with a hard, sharp cheese, such as Emmentaler, and good, dark dates.
(2) Shakespeare suggests we eat pippin apples along with caraway seeds, as Justice Shallow, in 2 Henry IV, talks about "a last year's pippin, with a dish of caraways." According to the wisdom of the day, things that "breed wind" (such as apples) should be eaten with things that break wind, such as caraway.
(3) When I was a child, we used to make walking salads: core an apple with an apple corer. Stuff the hollow with a mixture of peanut butter and raisins. Eat walking.
(4) Apple pie, in many variations
Waldorf salad
Servings variable
Ingredients
Good eating apples
Raisins
Celery (optional)
Walnuts
A good mayonnaise
Fresh lemon juice
Preparation
Cut the apples (peeled if not organic) into pieces. Slice the celery on the diagonal. Chop walnuts. Mix mayonnaise and lemon juice.
To make
Mix all ingredients. Sometimes, adulterating the real Waldorf salad, as I see it, you could add, to good effect, pieces of pineapple, other kinds of nuts, maybe bananas (but not really; don't do it), or pears.
ORDINARY APPLE PIE
serves 6
This is my mother's recipe, amended during the period of my dietary life when I wasn't eating refined sugar, though I had no qualms about honey, maple syrup, date sugar, and so forth. I copied the recipe onto a plain piece of paper that I tore from a little spiral notebook. The chads from the spirals have long since fallen away, leaving a ruffled edge on the left side of the paper, which is well stained and has been folded and unfolded so often the writing is just about obliterated at the fold. The recipe is written in pencil.
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| Photo by Justine May |
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup cold water (or more)
To make
Cut the butter into small chunks. Using a pastry mixer or two knives (or electrical gadgets for this sort of thing), cut the flour and salt into the butter until mixture resembles cornmeal. Add the water all at once and mix till dough clumps. Mound into two balls, wrap with plastic wrap, and chill well.
The pie
Ingredients
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| Photo by Justine May |
Unbaked crust for two layers
4-6 apples
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons cold water
1/2 cup honey
(1 teaspoon cinnamon, optional)
(1 tablespoon lemon juice, optional)
Milk
Preparation
Flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Peel and slice apples thinly. (To prevent apples from browning, you could put them in a bowl of cold water with a squeeze of lemon juice.) Preheat oven to 450º.
To maker
Roll pie dough into two 10-inch rounds. Place one in a 9-inch pie pan (preferably metal). Do not trim edges. Mix honey and cornstarch and mix into apples thoroughly. If your apples aren't very tasty, add the cinnamon and lemon juice. Pour apples into pie crust, mounding high in the center. Cover with the other rolled-out pie dough and pinch edges together, sealing well. Trim excess dough. Brush pie with milk to glaze. Cut several slashes in the top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake at 450º for 10 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 350º and bake another 35-45 minutes till apples are tender but not sauced and crust is crusty and golden.
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| Ordinary apple pie. Photo by Justine May |
APPLE PECAN UPSIDE DOWN PIE
serves 6
The crust
Ingredients
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 sticks unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/3 cup cold water
Preparation
Cut butter into small pieces. Flour a working surface and a rolling pin.
To make
Mix the flour, salt, and sugar, and cut the butter into that mixture with a pastry cutter, two knives, or your fingertips. (Or use a food processor.) When the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, add the cold water until mixture forms a ball. Divide dough into two balls, one slightly larger than the other. Dust with flour and wrap with wax paper or plastic wrap. Chill for 1 hour. Roll into two rounds of 1/4-inch thickness, one 12 inches, the other 10 or 11 inches in diameter.
Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted bvutter
2/3 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
1 1/4 cups chopped pecans
2 1/2 pounds good cooking apples
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
Preparation
Chop the pecans. Peel, core, and thinly slice the apples. Put them in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon juice to keep them from browning while you prepare the pie. Preheat the oven to 350º.
To make
Heat 6 tablespoons of butter over low heat. Add brown sugar and pecans; stir 1 minuet. Pour into a 9-inch pie plate and cool slightly. Place 12-inch round of dough over the pecans, leaving 1/2-inch overhang. In a bowl, toss apples with cinnamon, sugar, and flour to combine well. Spread this mixture on top of dough in pie pan, mounding the apples high in the center. Brush one side of the 10-inch dough with water and place it over the apples, wet side down. Press edges of dough together and trim. Slash the top of the crust several times with a sharp knife to allow steam to escape. Bake at 350º for 45-55 minute. Cool for 5 minutes. Invert onto a serving plate and serve at room temperature.
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| Upside down pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner |
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