“The Architecture of Orchards” in Malus

I’m very excited to have my article, “The Architecture of Orchards” in Issue 14 of Malus, a mighty little publication spreading ideas within the cider industry. You can read my article here. It is available on my publications page as well.

I’m especially delighted to see my article in print right next to one by James Crowden. I discovered James Crowden’s book Cider the Forgotten Miracle while I was working at Goren Farm in Devon in 2004 as a volunteer through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. I remember sitting in the barn near an ancient screw press and a barrel of cider while reading Crowden’s book. I was forever transformed. So I feel very honored to be included in a publication alongside him. Crowden opened my eyes to orchards as places of deep living, of stories, of tradition, and poetry.

Though I’ve thought about the material structure of orchards often, especially as regards the specific environmental benefits attributed to old standard orchard trees in Britain, I think there is much more to explore in thinking about them as architecture. The fields of vernacular architecture, landscape architecture, and cultural geography have tools for thinking about the intersection of natural and social worlds and how we construct the spaces we inhabit. I’m just at the beginning of this avenue of thought, and this article is an experiment. Tell me what you think!

If you haven’t read Malus, order yourself a copy or get a subscription right now! One of the wonderful things about this zine is its paper format, grounding us back in the world of material reading.

Did Prohibition Kill Cider? A Malus Myth Investigated

This article accompanies a panel at 2021 Cider Con called “Malus Busters” chaired by Greg Peck, with Chris Gerling and Doug Miller, devoted to busting some common myths of cider making, cider consumption, and cider history.

Prohibition is so often cited as the reason for the death of cider, the beverage of our founding fathers, that it has become something of a truism: founding myth of the contemporary cider industry in America. From the ashes of Prohibition and a long sleep in the aftermath of Temperance madness, the modern cider industry has risen again. But truisms deserve interrogation, and I’ve long wanted to investigate this one. This post is not necessarily an answer to the question about whether Prohibition killed cider, but a start to framing the question.

Malus – Myth

My professional scholarly discipline specializes in the study of myth. Myth is defined very narrowly in folklore studies. In The Study of American Folklore by Jan Brunvand, myth is defined as:

“…traditional prose narratives which in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past. Typically they deal with the activities of gods and demi-gods, the creation of the world and its inhabitants, and the origins of religious rituals” (Brunvand 170)

In everday usage, the term myth is often simply used to refer to something that is fictional, untrue, or contradictory to facts. Using the spirit of the definition of myth that Brunvand offers, however, help us understand why people tell stories in everyday life that are often at variance with demonstrable facts or science. If we think of myths as stories that define our worldview, it becomes clearer that any story, large or small, which is repeated often enough must have some cultural significance or social power. Such stories answer anxieties, beliefs, or questions that are important to the people who tell them. Often it is not enough to offer facts to dispute a myth, because a myth is not just a collection of facts. A myth is a framework for understanding facts. So to dispute a myth, you really have to break down the framework of the story.

I’m interested in the myth of Prohibition, not necessarily to prove it is completely untrue, but because it is a defining part of our story of cider in America. This story is such a prevalent narrative that it overpowers many other nuances in the history of apple growing and cider making in America. Studying it can also tell us as much about how people want to understand the world of cider today than about what actually happened in the past.

The Tall Tales of Temperance

Just today, the New York Times has published an article on the the comeback of applejack in the article, “America’s First Moonshine, Applejack, Returns in Sleeker Style.” The following clip from the article outlines the usual narratives about the relationship between Prohibition and cider:

None of the things mentioned here are untrue per se, but they gloss over a lot of nuance and in the end, overstate the influence of Prohibition as the event that that ended an era of cider making for America. First of all, the article they link to from 1884 “A Wicked Beverage” is clearly a example of satire. It is making fun of the overzealous attitudes of certain elements of the Temperance Movement, using hyperbolic and melodramatic characterizations in order marginalize their viewpoint for the reader:

One serious question worth asking: Why was cider and applejack considered so much more destructive and madness-inducing than whisky? And perhaps less seriously: What poetry might a New Jersey man crazy on applejack recite as he blows up his town?

In seriousness though, this piece of satire shows both how widespread and also how controversial such zealotry was considered at the time.

Orchards Razed? Or Repurposed?

The second point, that millions of acres of orchards were “razed and never replanted, because cheap and plentiful grain made whiskey easier to produce” is partially true as well. This is a second and very important part of the Prohibition myth: the chopping down or burning of apple trees and the razing of orchards, either directly by the hatchets of Temperance zealots or indirectly due to the decline of market for cider because of cheap grain available for whiskey. The story of the razing of orchards by Temperance zealots has been circulated in many contemporary popular publications, like this 2015 National Geographic article:

This claim has been addressed by historian William Kerrigan in his book Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History. Kerrigan shows that even in the 19th century, the influence of the Temperance movement on the decline of orchards was probably less than commentators published or circulated at the time, and certainly less than our own contemporary commentators claim. Kerrigan’s historical research and analysis are worth quoting at length:

“By 1829, at least a few farmers had taken the advice of ‘BURN THEM’ to heart. One report circulated in several journals told of a New Haven, Connecticut, gentleman who ‘ordered a fine apple orchard to be cut down, because the fruit may be converted into an article to promote intemperance.’ The editor of the New York Enquirer mocked this wasteful action, opining that, ‘in this age of Anti-societies, we may soon see the worthless of the land in league to establish an Anti-Apple and Anti-Rye Society.’ […] The story of the monomaniacal temperance man destroying apple orchards became part of the folklore of New England and the Midwest, and not only about missing orchards but also abandoned ones were attributed to the zeal of the reformers […] The number of orchards actually chopped down by temperance ultraists was likely not as great in reality as in local folklore. But endless moral castigations orchard-owning farmers faced from the temperance crusaders seemed to have an effect. Many a pious farmer was surely troubled by the accusation that by selling apples to cider mills he was serving Mammon instead of God. Many writers attributed the abandonment and neglect of old seedling orchards across New England to the temperance crusade, their owners apparently deciding to forgo the attacks on the moral character by simply neglecting orchards and letting nature swallow them up.” (Kerrigan 146-147)

Kerrigan goes on to show that Temperance was only one of several changes being wrought in American society that let to the decline of orchards used for cider:

“The self-provisioning farmer’s orchard that provided an abundance of household uses from cider and vinegar to dried apples and hog feed eventually yielded to the market-centered farmer’s orchard of fruit destined for the cider mill, the brandy distillery, or the big city market as fresh fruit. The temperance movement’s campaign against cider apples accelerated the shift to an age when Americans no longer drank their apples but ate them fresh instead.” (Kerrigan 191).

Kerrigan’s analysis highlights several nuances that can expand our understanding of the decline of cider by seeing the changes in agricultural economics that contributed to the changing place of the orchard in the family farm. Our contemporary popular image historical cider making generally appeals to the first example Kerrigan mentions: the self-provisioning farmer. This is the idea most people today have in their mind when they think about cider as part colonial and early westward settlement, assisted by the ministrations of Johnny Appleseed and his seedling orchards. Cider was part of a self-sustaining farm economy where the farmer produced much of what he needed on his own land.

But the move to a market economy allowed the farmer to sell his excess apples for profit, leading to some of the mass production of spirits that Temperance advocates were so opposed to. This market economy set the stage – not for a wholesale extinction of orchards – but for a switch to growing apples that were oriented for a different market: the wholesale fresh fruit market. This was aided by increasingly efficient transportation systems via canal, railroad, and expanded highway networks. As fresh fruit could be moved more quickly through these means, new markets for fresh fruit and juice, were created. Hard cider and spirits – stable products that could be easily transported across distances and without danger of spoilage – were simply no longer the only way urban and distant customers could enjoy the fruits of the land.

The parallel growth of the Temperance movement probably contributed to the growth growth of the fresh fruit market, but the availability of alternative forms of apples for consumption probably likewise fueled Temperance arguments against drinking apples as cider in a mutually self-reinforcing cycle of social movement and market economy influencing each other.

The gradual change from self-provisioning farms to more mobile market economy driven farms marked a gradual but significant shift in American society from a mostly agrarian to a mostly urban industrial society. It was in this context that the rise of cider’s replacement beverage, beer, became ascendant. Beer, brewed from grain which could be stored year-round an used when needed, became an industrially-produced product, available to sate the tastes of urban factory workers, and perfected by the knowledge and traditions of German immigrants who came to American shores in the late nineteenth century. When agriculture markets had shifted apple production to fresh fruit, aided by Temperance attitudes and transportation infrastructure, Prohibition put a nail in the coffin of an already dying cider and applejack trade. While the industrial production of beer could resume after Prohibition regardless of lingering Temperance attitudes against drink, the agricultural infrastructure for cider had already pivoted away and was not as easy to get back.

Prohibition, instituted from 1920-1933, certainly was the closing page of a chapter for cider, coming after almost a century of of activity in the Temperance movement and ongoing industrialization of agriculture and industry, but it can’t be blamed entirely for killing off cider-making.

The Endurance of the Myth

So why does it still loom so large in our popular imagination, conjured up as it is in these reputable media articles and on the lips of countless contemporary cider makers? The answer to this question lies in an analysis of modern ideas and interests rather than a sifting of the evidence of the past. Myths are made by people to explain their current understanding of the world. Myths are totalizing, world-defining, and less concerned with facts than with human drama.

So what is it about the “Prohibition Killed Cider” story that is so compelling. In the first place, it is a convenient, short, simplistic sound bite that appeals to a basic understanding of a significant milestone American history. It is not false, but it also glazes over a complex truth.

Clearly defined in time by the dates legislating its beginning and end, and in substance by its effect on the legal status of alcohol production and consumption, Prohibition is a clear mark on the long calendar of the nation’s history. Prohibition is much easier to conceptualize as a distinct moment than the much longer and more complicated strands of the Temperance movement, extending over two centuries and riddled with both positive and negative impacts on American life, intertwined with changing agricultural and industrial economies as well as the rise of urban life and the decline of rural communities.

However, I also think the myth of Prohibition killing cider persists because this narrative does substantial cultural work in creating a public perception of the industry and cider makers today. It positions contemporary cider makers as culinary heroes, showing how they have brought cider back from its dreadful grave of Prohibition and celebrates the the standards of taste that have allowed craft beverages like cider and applejack to flourish today.

In many of the media articles in popular circulation, cider is primarily discussed in term of its place within the context of food and drink appreciation, not agricultural economics. The bulk of this New York Times article on the resurgence of Applejack is about cultures of drinking centered around craft beverage, urban cocktail culture, and culinary appreciation. To blame Prohibition for the death of cider is to contrast our current cultures of culinary taste with the bores and the fuddy-duddies who enforced Prohibition on the country rather than preserve the food and beverage traditions we are now so keen to celebrate. To target Prohibition is to elevate the current state of our more cosmopolitan appreciation of craft cider and applejack.

What the myth of Prohibition ignores are all of the things that aren’t really of interest to the majority of urban consumers of craft beverages: the impact of market economies on commodity crops, the development industrial food systems, and all the messy cultural implications of the temperance movement. Prohibition is easy to blame and in reciprocal evaluation, makes contemporary cider makers easier to love.

Why Nit-Pick? Just Pick Cider!

Why take a long blog post to nitpick on the fine points of a popular myth? Positioning and promoting cider in terms of its culinary relevance is certainly a savvy thing to do if you are a business. But the ubiquitous use of the Prohibition narrative to explain cider narrows the kinds of stories that can be told about it and the significance it can have in the communities it wants to cultivate.

There are a plethora of other stories to tell: of family farms who have weathered the changing economic winds, of communities who have continued to use windfalls of old orchards of local food resilience, of indigenous communities reclaiming their land. Cider is a small part of the story of apples in America, and Prohibition an even smaller story still. If cider can tell a wider variety of stories about its relationship to apples, landscapes, people, and places, it can forge a more varied, resilient, and real relationship with its consumers and communities. Let’s pick more stories of cider to tell than Prohibition.

Post Script: Great Minds Think Alike

After presenting this talk and post, Dan Pucci pointed me in the way of this recent post from Mark Turdo of https://pommelcyder.wordpress.com and Andrew Tobia discussing this same topic! Great to find minds that thinking alike! Check out this post to find out what Mark and Andrew have to say https://www.alcoholprofessor.com/blog-posts/rise-and-fall-of-american-cider-culture

Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage Events at Cider Week 2016

This post was written as a guest post for the Cider Week Finger Lakes blog as a prelude to Cider Week 2016.  Please visit their site to find out about all the amazing events happening during Cider Week Finger Lakes.

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Old Orchard west of Watkins Glen, NY

I’ve been looking forward to Cider Week Finger Lakes 2016 all year, and here’s why: I’m hoping Cider Week 2016 will be an opportunity to learn more about the history of cider making and fruit growing from you, the public. The Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage Project  is making its debut to ask what you know about the roles that orchards, cider, and fruit have played in our region’s heritage.  I want to know about the old trees and orchards in your back yard, and the stories, anecdotes, experiences, and skills that are woven into the fabric of your fruit landscapes.

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Barrelling Apples – House, grain building, 1906, from the Verne Morton Collection: The History Center of Tompkins County

Cider Week has grown as our local agricultural entrepreneurs have rediscovered the craft of cider making and nurtured it in new and innovative directions.  But cider was made in our region before, in the homes and on the farms of many people who settled the Finger Lakes region, travelling west from New England in search of better land.   They planted fruit trees to supply their own families with food and beverage.  And local people have made hard and sweet cider from them for generations.  Keep your eyes peeled while you are driving through the countryside, and you might spot an old orchard you never noticed before.

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Eric Shatt of Redbyrd Cider prunes and old orchard near Burdette, NY

Some of these old farm orchards still remain on our landscape today, and local cider makers, commercial and hobbyist, care for and use them, up to 150 years after they were originally planted.

What happened to these frontier farms? And the orchards that were an essential ingredient in their domestic economies? Some are still going, but many small hill farms that were unprofitable were abandoned during hard economic times.  Some areas that were once farmed are now re-wilded as parks and reserves, like the Finger Lakes National Forest or the Connecticut Hill Wildlife Management Area.  And some of them have long been sources for cider.

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Home Cider Maker Steve Daughhetee near the remains of an enormous old orchard near his home west of Ithaca, NY.  He believes these trees are Newtown Pippins.

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Photos from an article on States Cider Mill in the Ithaca Journal, October 26, 1974

Carl States, whose father owned the States Cider Mill in Odessa, remembers how local people went foraging in the abandoned farm orchards on Connecticut Hill when he was growing up in the 1960s.  They brought the apples to be pressed at his father’s cider mill, which was still being operated by another family into the early 1990s, when it finally closed down when new requirements for pasteurization were passed into law.

“Most of the old timers would bring plenty of apples, more that what they needed, and then Dad would buy what was left over with, or they would just take it home with them in gallons or give it away. Apples were pretty plentiful then.  A lot of people when I was a kid – all the old orchards were still in production on Connecticut hill, because all the old farms were abandoned in the depression, but the orchards were still there.  So you could go up and get all the apples you wanted for free – just go up and pick them.” – Carl States

A few local cider makers who are at the heart of Cider Week today, including Ian and Jackie Merwin of Black Diamond Farm, remember taking their apples to be pressed at States Cider Mill.  Places like these are now receding into memory, but it is here where the connection between our modern Cider Revival and the local heritage of cider can be made.

In addition to celebrating our amazing local cider businesses, I hope Cider Week continues to grow in exploring the history of cider deep in our region’s past, and nurtures the growing networks of DIY enthusiasts, home brewers, gardeners, and farmers who are renewing the spirit of cider making and cider drinking as a part of everyday life.

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Debbie and John Ball in the old orchard outside Watkins Geln they have restored over the past 20 years.  The orchard may be over 150 years old.

This Cider Week, I am hoping you can help me document our cider history through events hosted by the Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage Project.  This project, an initiative of the Folk Arts program at The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, will explore the fruit heritage of our region and highlight the agricultural and culinary practices that have molded our landscape, from apple orchards, to peaches, cherries, berries, and of course, grapes. I’m hoping to find more evidence about the history of local cider culture, in your stories and photographs, and in the apples growing in your back yard or on your farm.

Cider Week is a celebration of an agricultural and culinary craft brought back to life.  Our cider future looks amazingly bright, and new orchards are springing up to supply it.  But there’s still much to learn about the cider past, and how it’s shaped our local landscape, culture, and palate.  I hope you will join the Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage Project events to share your knowledge and connect our local cider history with our cider future.

The Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage Project is hosting three Documentation Days and one Apple Identification Day during Cider Week, and you are invited to come share your fruit stories and learn about their apples.

Documentation Days at the Elmira Wisner Market (September 29, 10am-2pm) and the Montour Falls Harvest Festival (October 1, 12pm-7pm) are an opportunity to stop by the Finger Lakes Fruit Heritage listening booth and share stories, photographs or documents for our archive of fruit heritage.  Tell us about your memories of making cider, apple butter, pie, wine, preserves. Describe pruning, parties, people who were the local masters of theses crafts. Your stories will help us see the larger picture of fruit and cider in the Finger Lakes.

The Apple Identification and Documentation Day at Reisinger’s Apple Country (October 8, 9am – 12noon) invites the public to bring apples to be identified by our pomologist panel, including Dr. Greg Peck of Cornell University and John Reynolds of Blackduck Cidery.  If you’ve been wondering what that old tree at the back of the property is, now is your chance to find out! Bring 3-5 apples from each tree you would like to identify. You can then log your finds and deposit any stories you have at the listening booth.  For more information on directions and what to expect, visit http://www.earts.org/finger-lakes-fruit-events

These events are a project of The Folk Arts Program at The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in collaboration with partners at Reisinger’s Apple Country, Schuyler County Cor­nell Cooperative Extension, Cornell University Department of Horticulture, and Montour Falls Public Library. This project is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Dorothy Hartley: Verjuice

41zXLaljcLL._SX338_BO1,204,203,200_I’ve been reading Lost World: England 1933-1936, a collection of essays by Dorothy Hartley, originally written for the Daily Sketch Newspaper.  Dorothy was an eccentric, a wanderer, and a writer, whose prose style was that of a novelist or perhaps a literary naturalist, but (thankfully) not the dry analysis of an anthropologist. Lucy Worsley, in her foreword to the book, described Dorothy as, “a slightly crazy but utterly admirable figure, who broke free of a solidly middle-class background to become a roving reporter for rural England. To research her books and articles, she travelled the country, interviewing country folk who still just about did things ‘the old way’ before mass production and industrialization and mechanization changed farming beyond recognition.”

I read Dorothy’s writing and meet the kind of writer and explorer I would like to be. But Dorothy slept rough under hedges and was not afraid to wander alone in the remoter corners of rural England. I’m not quite so intrepid. The scenes, people, and lifestyles she captured represented the last gasp of rural life before the industrialization of farming. Her observations highlight the receding quality of this world. Reading them, one begins to see the deep attachment to rural nostalgia underpinning English culture as the twentieth century marches forward. But in Dorothy’s writing, that nostalgia is not saccharine or rose-colored.  It is full of the raw material of old crafts and ways of life.

Dorothy’s writing is filled with the lexicon of another era.  In the passage I share below, she refers to “beetles” and “hogsheads” as she talks of the implements of cider making.  The recipe for verjuice that she provides calls for, “handfuls of damask rose leaves,” an ingredient I’ve never encountered before. Reading her prose, you experience cider not only as a constellation of tastes and smells, but a world of words, of knowledge, of the material experience of a way of life now past. The passage below is not one of her more poetic ones, but it is full of information. The source of her quoted recipe is unclear, but nevertheless, it is replete with detail:

….

From “Let us consider our drinks” in Lost World by Dorothy Hartley

Verjuice

Curiously, the Hereford cider and ‘Along-the-border’ cider are made after the old recipes for making verjuice.  Verjuice was the sharp crab-apple juice, used in medieval cookery as frequently as the lemon is to-day.  It probably had considerable effect in mitigating the massive meat diet and salted-pork-and-beans of those days. Here is the recipe for verjuice, because it is interesting in connection with the cider recipes:-

Gather your crabs as soon as the kernels turne blacke, and having laid them awhile in a heap to sweat together take and pick from the stalkes, then in long troughs with beetles for the purpose, crush and break them all to mash, then take a bagge of coarse hairecloth, as square as the press, and fill it with the crushed crabs, and press it while any moisture will drop forth. Turn it into sweet hogsheads and to every hogshead put half a dozen handfuls of damask rose leaves, and tun it up and spend it as you should have occasion.

Now in parts of the West the best cider makers look out for crabs, and crab trees figure among the hundred odd sorts of apple trees that various makers of cider import, and plant, and transplant, and acclimatize to improve their brews.  Hundreds of letters and MS [manuscripts] are about cider apple trees.

Down South they made the cider through straw and the variety of the brews show the antiquity of the procedure.  Cornish miners used to put hot sheep’s blood into it! Devon folks cream or milk! Kent writers mention the gum of cherry trees. Perry was never so popular, probably because the juicy eating pear, the Wardon, was prized for serving with cream and reverence, and the other pears were woody.  Some recipes make a stew of them in cider.

Cider belongs to the apple-blossom South as surely as whisky belongs to the heather-land North.

 

 

Cider Salon, NYC

When you need to advance beyond the next creative horizon; when you have an idea buzzing around in your mind that needs to be refracted through the lens of a different constellation of thoughts;  or when you are tired, tired, worn, and barely able to think in the middle of a long slog of seasonal work – what do you do?  Seek out your colleagues. Cider makers are a sociable lot, though often isolated by the demands of their individual businesses.  So it is not surprising when they get together, but it is delightful.  I’ve been fortunate to peek in on a couple of events recently that have opportuned some cider-maker mind-melding.  In this post, I’ll talk about a recent Cider Salon, and in a following post, I’ll write about a tasting with Finger Lakes Cider godfather Peter Hoover.

The Cider Salon at Jimmy’s Number 43 during Cider Week New York was an intimate afternoon and evening of talks and tastings with a variety of cider makers, authors, and orchardists from New York, New England, and even a few invited visitors from the Northwest. Rubbing elbows with fellow cider people was unavoidable, as the space was small, and the audience enthusiastic.  Many a small or aspiring cider maker was there, and the atmosphere was sparking with the individual excitements of cider enthusiasts, tempered by the wonderful opportunity to see and participate in discussions with and between the more established commercial cider makers. This is what makes a salon such a great format – the informal opportunities to chat with colleagues and hear from people whose work your admire.  But also the opportunity to get beyond the sales pitch and talk creatively, intellectually, about the craft with those who know it and love it with equal fervor.

Shepherded by cider writer Eric West and organized and hosted by proprietor Jimmy Carbone and Gay Howard of United States of Cider, the day brought commercial cider makers new and old together. Jacob Lagoner introduced his Embark Craft Ciders from the shores of Lake Ontario, and Jahil Maplestone of Descendant Cider in the heart of the City paired up with Murrays for some cheese tasting. Highlights for me were the sparring contest between Steve Wood of Farnum Hill and Kevin Zielinski of EZ Orchards on the challenges and triumphs of orcharding and cider making in the Northeast versus the Northwest. Reverend Nat himself from Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider also made it out from the West Coast to wow the East Coast apple purists with the hopped, fruited, magicked and suited ciders he has been so successful with on his side of the country.

Andy Brennan of Aaron Burr Cider and Steve Selin of South Hill Cider talked wild apples, a conversation that was continued with Rowan Jacobsen, author of Apples of Uncommon Character and recently an article “The Feral Cider Society”, during an event at Wassail the following day.  Every so often I get author envy when I see someone write a book or an article I wish I had written.  Rowan Jacobsen wins the envy prize this month, but he kindly signed my copy of his book, so thank you sir, for upping the cider writing game!

All cider makers bring something different to the craft, and Steve, Andy, and Rowan bring a particularly artistic viewpoint. Rowan is a writer; Andy is a painter and draftsman; Steve is a musician and luthier.  I suspect that they think about cider, apples, and trees in ways that mirror their other endeavors, reorienting materials, experimenting within the structures of a form, and thus, reorganizing how we experience and understand the the genre of cider itself. They imagine cider in ways that take us outside the orchard, beyond the restaurant pairing menu, and into the unique genetic, environmental landscape that has created the feral apples of the Northeastern United States.

Their approach reshapes not only how we experience the taste of cider made by wild fruit, but how we think about the landscape these feral trees inhabit.  The landscape history of our Northeastern region, one of deforestation, cultivation, and reforestation, is one that most of us are unaware of.  Trees are everywhere, right? They make us see the trees in our wooded regions differently. Through their ciders, though, the palette of the forest, and its depth of history becomes more nuanced. Steve, Andy, and Rowan may be the most recognized voices on the art of wild, or feral fruit, but there are certainly many others out in the woods, who know their trees, and who are exploring the evolving character of the fruitful American woodland.

And it’s not just the forests upstate that are being explored and turned inside out. Even Wassail’s cider director Dan Pucci chimed in to talk about foraging in the wilds of New York City, endeavors chronicled in this Vice article.

This is what excites me most about cider, the approaches that trace not just a taste, or an aroma, but that reorient our whole relationship to landscape through the appreciation of the fruit, the tree, the land, and the people who interact with it over time.

My echo of this Cider Salon on the bare pages of a blog can in no way reproduce the buzz of the crowd or the flow of conversation.  Which is why  I hope there are more cider salons in the future.  The small scale, non-commercial cider makers who peppered the audience certainly can’t make it to NYC often, and Jimmy’s place was barely big enough to hold this inaugural group.  Cider Salons, go forth a multiply.  It would be lovely to see more opportunities to talk about the art, history, and culture of the craft!

 

 

 

 

Two Apple Festivals, One Weekend

Cider Week Finger Lakes was a smash!  And our cup runneth over with events.  To start off this Cider Week, I went to two different apple festivals, one connected to Cider Week, and the other not.

On Friday afternoon on the first weekend of October, I left work early and headed for the Ithaca Apple Festival.  In its 33rd year, the Ithaca Apple Festival had been, until recently I am told, bereft of much connection to apples. But with the advent of Cider Week Finger Lakes, the cider makers are now a big presence at the Apple Festival, which acts as a kick-off for the region’s Cider Week.

Walking down State Street, I could see all the trappings of a street fair calling – some small scale carnival rides, the twirling teacups, a carousel, two gourmet mac and cheese food trucks, a Columbian street food vendor.  A  skinny bearded young guy pulled a cart collecting compost.  A tired carney checked his cell phone. College kids took selfies with their steaming cups of cider, and an old man in overalls stood behind an unglamorous but bountiful stall of vegetables. Two ladies sat beside a community quilt, selling tickets to raffle it off.  A corridor of handmade jewellery and brooms and aprons funneled the crowd crossways.

A steady stream of young professionals and grad students rotated in and out of the Cellar d’Or Wine and Cider Shop, queuing up to taste and take with cider makers from Black Diamond Farm, Redbyrd Cider, South Hill Cider, and Eve’s Cidery, who stood with steady arms and long patience beside their barrels and bottles.

Outside, on the commons, the ciders and the wineries, the soup seller, and the orchards and apple vendors, all made the most of the festival theme.  Fresh apples, apple soup, hot cider, hard cider, sweet cider, dry cider, turnovers from Indian Creek Orchard, and doughnuts from Little tree orchard – and a line 20 feet long to get them.  The horticulture students hawked the fruits of Cornell’s research orchards.

The next day, I headed out to the Newark Valley Historical Society Apple Festival, an event in its 36th year, with no connection to Cider Week Finger Lakes. The weather had turned grey and misty and cold, but I got in my car and drove east on 79 out of Ithaca, turning south down 38, into hills and valleys.  Route 38 is an old turnpike, and you can see the age of the road by its early farmhouses. As I approached the Newark Valley Historical Society Apple Festival, a sign warned cars to slow down, and pumpkins lined the road where policemen directed traffic into the adjacent field.

The small living history museum was filled for the day with demonstrators and vendors of historical, traditional, and rural arts.  An enormous iron kettle filled with salt potatoes was boiling in the midst of the tents, and under two tall old trees, a mobile cider mill was hissing, spitting, grinding, and pressing.

Asking about the mill, I fell into conversation with the husband and wife operating it, who then introduced me to its builder, C.O. Smith, aged 92. Mr. Smith shook my hand and told me that the engine on the mill was over 105 years old, and that he had built the machine to replicate one that his grandfather had used on their farm south of Rochester.  It was built for the festival, which he and others had started as a way to raise funds for the Historical Society.

I wandered through the festival and spoke to woodcarvers from the Catatonk Valley Woodcarver’s group, to a luthier who builds dulcimers in traditional and avant garde designs, and to a beekeeper whose honeys were made of nectars as varied as the apple blossoms of spring to the invasive Japanese knotweed that chokes the landscape and blooms profusely in late summer.

These two apple festivals, happening simultaneously and within 40 miles of each other, and yet in some ways worlds apart, show different sides of the region’s apple culture, speaking to different audiences, in different communities.  The Ithaca festival is more obviously commercial, and the Newark Valley festival skews more historical and educational.  While preserving the uniqueness of each festival and the communities they serve, it would be interesting to see what could happen if the commercial and the educational missions of each festival could enliven and enrich each other.

How much more rooted can commerce be if it can draw on a region’s historical identity? How much more present and emergent can history be if it is a living resource for the new commercial enterprises that Cider Week Finger Lakes seeks to promote? There are more apple festivals to visit, and an exciting possible future for the relationship of Cider Week Finger Lakes to long-running community celebrations.

Mistletoe

During my research in England, I wrote some fieldnote observations (reposted below) about my encounters with mistletoe, and I recently got to revisit them in a conversation with Annie Corrigan on WFIU Radio’s Earth Eats Program.  If you are interested in further information on mistletoe, please visit pages by Jonathan Briggs, whose work has brought the botany, conservation, and social history of mistletoe out of the orchard and into the 21rst century: Mistletoe Matters and Jonathan’s Mistletoe Diary.

IMG_2680December 8, 2011.  Fieldnotes. It is a windy, rainy day outside, and at 3:30pm, I definitely need the lights on inside.  I am perched on my little snug chair next to the woodstove. The darkness of winter here has definitely been one of the hardest things for me to deal with, and if left to natural devices, I would probably take a cue from the other mammals about and go into hibernation for the next few months.  The days are definitely shorter here than back at home, but I think part of it is the fact that my fieldwork takes me outside a lot.  Instead of being compelled to get to work in a lighted building for eight hours, I find the waxing and waning of the sun’s light has a much greater influence on my experience of the working day.

During this dark period, another product of the orchard has preoccupied me for the past several weeks, and that is mistletoe.  I only learned that mistletoe favored growing on apple trees, and particularly in the south-west midlands of Britain, in October, when my wwoof host at the Hatch pointed it out to me as we were harvesting apples and pears from the orchard.  He mentioned that he used to sell the mistletoe, but the comment escaped my notice until someone mentioned the Tenbury Wells Mistletoe Auction to me some time later.

The town of Tenbury Wells is located just on the borders of three counties – Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire.  And allegedly, these mistletoe auctions have been going on for the past 150 years, though they were threatened with closure recently when the cattle market, where they were held, closed.  In an effort to help save the auctions and retain one of the town’s claims to fame, some folks cooked up the Mistletoe Festival, complete with a mistletoe queen, a Druid procession, and various other Christmas activities.  You can read more about it on their website here.

While the festival itself is, of course, interesting as a consciously invented tradition, I was actually more interested in the relationship of the mistletoe sales to the issues of orchard management.  It turns out that mistletoe thrives in old and traditionally managed orchards. I sent off some inquiring emails to the estate agents who run the auction, and received a reply from a local farmer who was happy to talk to me.

Armed with my photographic equipment, I set off to the first auction, which happened on Nov 29th.  Turns out I wasn’t the only one with a camera.  There were LOADS of camera-toting people there, from amateur on-lookers to highly professional rigs.  One guy, who turned out to be a floral photographer, even had his assistant/model, all dolled up in ‘authentic’ looking pristine wellies and beautifully matching fuzzy lavender hat and gloves, posing as if she was inspecting and buying the mistletoe.  The place was just dripping in nostalgia, or at least that is what all the photographers seemed to be framing in their cameras.

The actual business of the auction, though, seemed to go on without much notice of the photographers and onlookers.  And it was really business.  The auctioneer, with hs portable loudspeaker and cadre of assistants keeping track of the lot numbers, bidders, and prices, moved up and down the rows of wreaths, holly, and mistletoe, offering a starting price, sometimes with a comment to the quality (“look at the berries on that”) and taking the bids from the small crowd of what seemed to be seasoned veteran buyers. People in the middle of conducting business transactions aren’t terribly interested in being interviewed, so this situation required a lot more courage, so to speak, on my part, going up to people and asking if they would answer a few questions in between hauling their green purchases to their vans, lorries, and cars.

The guys pictured here had driven all the way from Cork, Ireland and slept in their van and were filling it to the brim for the trip home, where they would sell it through their Christmas tree yard.  They were very friendly. Many of the buyers were from florists and garden centers, along with some other small scale Christmas tree vendors.  My best tactic for talking to people seemed to be to stand near the bidding action, and turn to the person next to me to ask if they were selling or buying, and launch into an uninvited conversation.  The next week, when I returned for the next auction, I came armed with a printed survey in self-addressed, stamped, envelopes, which I could simply give to people to complete and mail back to me at their leisure.  Even so, it was hard to get it into a lot of hands.  I didn’t meet any sellers, but on my second visit, I walked up and down the rows of mistletoe and holly writing down the names and addresses of the sellers written on the tags of each lot.  Not all had addresses, but it might be a start for contacting sellers and talking to them later.

One group of people whom I have not had the courage to talk to yet are the gypsies.  Along with the farmers who bring mistletoe from their orchards to sell, there are groups of gypsies who gather it from farmers’ orchards and sell it on at the auction.  I did walk up to two men who seemed to be lingering by the side of the auction yard among groups of people whom I took to be gypsies.  As I tried to start a conversation with them, their first question was if I was a journalist, after which, one of them ranted for a bit about how it wasn’t all christmas cheer and roses harvesting the mistletoe.  It was hard work, at which point, he pulled up his sweater to show me an enormous scar running across his side and up to his ribcage.  I attempted to banter for a bit, and they seemed to warm up to me, but I decided not to push questions.  Maybe later.

I did go visit one farm, Eastham Court Farm near Tenbury Wells. I was greeted, to my surprise, by a 22-year old guy, recently graduated from an engineering degree, who had moved home to his parents’ farm.  And while he was sorting out what to do next, he had taken their mistletoe business in hand and set up an online direct-sales business, bypassing the auction.  You can find his website here.  He emphasized the need for farmers to change and adapt to new ways of doing business.  He took me out into their orchards: organic, 60-year old orchards which he seemed to think were in definite decline.  Even though they were lovely places to be, with their widely spaced, large, old trees, he didn’t think orchards like this would last much longer, as newer orchards with more closely-spaced, smaller trees were replanted. And there was the mistletoe, hanging in lacy green orbs from the branches of the trees, sometimes almost overwhelming them.  The farmers have to cut it back every year, or it will sap the energy of the tree and decrease the apple harvest, if not kill it slowly outright.  Piles of mistletoe lay on the ground, much of it to be discarded, as there was just too much even to sell.

Cider on the Prairie

IMG_2624I decided to pay a visit to a place very close to my heart: Conner Prairie Living History Museum, where I worked for about five summers during college. I had not been back in many years, and I was excited to find, in addition to familiar memories of my first experiences in orchards, some pleasing new connections to cider and wine.

Just north of Indianapolis, this museum has several recreated historic areas depicting the development of European settlement in the state of Indiana during the nineteenth century: an 1816 Lenape Trading Post, an 1836 Prairietown village and a Civil War era farm.  I spent a lot of time here wearing excessive amounts of clothing  while doing period cooking over an open fire, and it was here that I first fell in love with historic agriculture and cookery.

Though there are many historic and reconstructed buildings in the museum, the only building original to the property is the 1820s farmhouse built by William Conner – fur trader, settler, farmer, and entrepreneur – which overlooks an agriculturally advantageous horse-shoe bend of the White River.

I’ve always loved houses of this period: the high ceilings and large windows let in so much light and air.  Even on a hot day, they are flung open, allowing the outdoor and indoor worlds to co-mingle.  The kitchens, based around a hearth and a worktable, have room to move in – theatres in the round of culinary action, based around moving bodies instead of appliances.  And there is nothing so alive as an open hearth, where cooking is a matter of well-honed instinct for the smell of baking (or burning) bread, and a sense of temperature according to the skin, rather than a thermometer.

One of the things I loved about working there was the effect it had on the senses.   There are many criticisms to be levelled at living history museums – that they tidy up the past into a theme-park fantasy, focus too much on white rural settler narratives at the expense of other American experiences, and create awkward scenarios for visitor interaction.  But I still believe in their fundamental purpose of introducing history as something that can be partially experienced through the body.  The trick is in moving the experience beyond simple fantasy to sympathy, where one’s bodily, sensory grasp of the material conditions of the past inspires a more personal interior understanding of another individual’s possible experience.  To walk in another person’s shoes, to cook at another person’s hearth.  To press apples the way it was done in 1836.  Sympathy is, I believe, a profoundly democratic aspiration, and a morally and socially complex approach to history.

Spending a good portion of the day working in an un-electrified environment with no running water slows down the pace of life immensely.   Sometimes, during a few slow hours, I would just watch shadows creep across the floor.  It profoundly changed my sense of light, colour, and visual perception.

IMG_2657Occasionaly on my lunch break, I walked through the old neglected orchard on the back end of the property, in an area that was at that time off-limits to visitors.  The apples, a golden yellow variety named “Early Transparent” which ripen in July, would fall to the ground and begin to rot, making the humid air thick with the perfume of pulp fermenting in the searing Indiana sun.  Since the museum’s expansions in recent years, it has been cleaned up, the old decrepit trees removed.  Currently, only a few remain, but even these produce enough for the possibility of cider-making.

I played a number of characters in the historic village, each with varying degrees of museum-sanctioned, historically accurate biography, and a lot of material improvised during the everyday interactions of museum staff, where the lines between history, theatre, and everyday life were sometimes ephemeral and shifting.   I often mused on the possible inner lives of the fictional characters I portrayed in short poems, including this one , about a young woman living on a new farm at the edge of the wilderness, dreaming of an orchard in the more settled, cultivated life she had left back east.  Settlers on the frontier are usually portrayed as looking confidently forward, into the wilderness in the American Myth. But so much of the transformation of that frontier was created by looking backwards.  The space on the zone of transformation, between forest and orchard, must have been fraught with  excitement, regret, and trepidation.

IMG_2586I was excited to find that one of my old co-workers, who had started as a teen volunteer when I worked there, was now a full time staff member who seems to be influencing things in favour or historic beer, wine, and cider making!  Witness this project in progress at the carpentry shop, a cider press apparently constructed after a historic design.  I’ve not seen one like this before, so I am keen to find out more about it.

She had success last year with elderberry wine.  The berries on the bush outside the barn look promising, and bottles labeled “Elderberry” sit temptingly on the shelves of the tavern room in the reconstructed Golden Eagle Inn in the 1836 village.

I hope to be able to report back about the progress of cider making at Conner Prairie later in the fall, especially regarding the historical research they are drawing on to portray cider making in nineteenth century Indiana.

Wassail: An Unexpected Revival

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Flyer for the Foxwhelp Morris Wassail, Preston on Wye 2012

I was sitting in a pub in East Hackney, London one January night a few years ago trying to convince a young man from Portsmouth that English people did in fact practice the custom of wassail.  “Wassail?” he said.  “I’ve never heard of that.  English people don’t do that.  I don’t believe you.”  I parried his aura of certainty with my own indisputable fact: I had just travelled down to a remote corner of Devonshire to participate in a wassail.  I had seen it for myself.  We had traipsed round a village in the Blackdown Hills singing for cider and wishing good health to the farmhouse, the garage, the old vicarage, the pub, and finally the orchard itself. English people DO wassail. The young man’s incredulity about the existence of this custom is understandable, though.  With a few notable exceptions of wassail celebrations that claim to have survived unbroken into the present, such as the one at Carhampton, Somerset, the custom seems to have died out or disappeared most everywhere else, surviving only as a festive Christmas drink or an obsolete word in a carol.  In the past few years, however, a notable revival has been rising, and as several of my friends in England put it, everyone seems to want to have a wassail now. So why did wassailing die out in England, and why is it being revived now?  These were some of the questions I set out to answer when I first trekked out to torchlit winter processions on the twelfth night of Christmas in Devon, and later Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire. Many people think of Wassail as a remnant pagan custom, and it is easy to see why, when black-faced Morris men lead hordes of otherwise tame urbanites carrying torches through old orchards to sing to the apple trees and scare off witches with gunfire.  It’s an enthusiastic performance of what some might think of as a primitive, superstitious approach to life, which might seem refreshing after the daily grind of rational civility. Being outside after the endless indoor Christmas parties feels like a release, and the bonfires and torches light up the night in a way that wakes your tired soul from the dreary sleep of midwinter. And the cider, well the cider just makes you feel sublime, a bit euphoric.  The torches seem brighter.  The night seems blacker.  And it feels like anything is possible inside the circle of trees that almost seem alive.

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Morris Man from Silurian Morris at the Tenbury Wassail 2013

I think the custom’s visceral tactile appeal stems from the sensory stimulation of frost and fire and the imaginative tunnel of superstition usually silenced in a society based on scientific rationality.  It’s an opportunity to get out and be a little wild for a night, and that’s what rituals and festivals are often good for, shaking up our everyday habits and injecting the mundane world with mystery and significance we don’t usually feel. Some of the people I came to know who had helped revive wassail over the last twenty years had a much less superstitious orientation to the custom, though, and their perspectives shed light on some of the social realities of rural agricultural life and highlight the enormous social changes it has undergone in the past century.  Wassail, a custom historically based in rural society and food production, has something to teach us about the changing ways we work with each other, as well as the ways we interact with natural and agricultural resources. For Eric Freeman, a life-long farmer in the rural countryside of Gloucestershire, and his friends Pete Symonds, a former electrician from the Forest of Dean, and Albert Rixen, a plumber and engineer, wassail was a tribute to the work of the agricultural year and an emblem of the social contract between farmers and their agricultural workers. Pete Symonds is a skilled tradesman in a rural community whose livelihood suffered with the outsourcing of industrial work overseas.  He saw in wassail the opportunity to celebrate the social bonds of working men and commemorate the cooperative nature of agricultural labor in an era before industrialization. Albert Rixen, devoted to restoring old steam engines, including antique steam powered cider equipment, also lends his workman’s approach to wassail and cider making, keeping alive the mechanical heritage of agricultural work.  Eric Freeman, a tireless supporter of agriculturally-oriented social networks such as the Young Farmers and groups devoted to saving rare breeds of livestock, has dedicated much of his life to the practice of farming not just as a business or even a personal vocation, but a way of life still full of social and cultural richness.

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Eric Freeman holding the Wassail Cup at his annual Wassail in Huntley, Gloucestershire

For these men, the resurrection of the custom of wassail was not about superstition at all.  The considerable labor involved in preparing the bonfires and torches and orchestrating the festival mirrored the kind of labor they wanted to celebrate – shared labor, social labor, the kind of labor that was necessary to keep a pre-industrial farm going.  This is the kind of labor that makes work worthwhile, and which seems to be slipping away in a world of global markets, where labor is outsourced, rural communities are left slowly crumbling, and agriculture produces commodities instead of food. It’s also important to remember that the social contract didn’t always work, that standards of living for agricultural workers in the pre-industrial era were generally dire.  But wassail was a moment when the contract was tested, when the workers held the orchard and the farm hostage for a night, demanding food and drink from their employers in return for performing the wassail and ensuring a fertile crop in the year to come.  Superstition becomes bare social reality here, because without a satisfied workforce, the farm could not be productive.  Without workers, there would be no harvest, no fertility.  Wassail was a kind of symbolic labor negotiation, with the potential harvest hanging in the balance.  And the next Monday after twelfth night, known as Plough Monday, work started again.  The fields were ploughed for the coming year.

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Leominster Morris Wassail in Eardisley, Herefordshire 2013

It all seems a bit serious for a rowdy evening of cider drinking, morris dancing, and bonfire lighting.  And don’t get me wrong, sometimes one of the most obvious reasons to join in a wassail is simply for a good prank, a good drink, and an excuse to dress up in funny costumes and indulge in a little pyromania.  But the interplay of superstition, social history, and a walloping good time is what makes wassail a tradition with depth and complexity that can appeal to people on many levels, even as they face adapting to economic, social, and environmental change in their communities.

Can wassail take hold in North America?  A real, strong tradition here will depend on our own social needs and reasons for adopting a custom.  It will be exciting to see how it takes shape as we begin to re-invest attention in our agriculture, our orchards, and our cider.  In a way, the social contract we are now re-exploring with our food system, our environment, and our economies makes wassail all the more relevant, and the tables have turned.  Wassail, in all its irreverent topsy turvy midwinter glory, reminds us that agriculture and food production, even in our industrialized, exploitative, globalized era is still a social, and an environmental contract.  In an old-fashioned way, it poses the question “Are we in it together folks?”  And its pretty exciting to hear folks replying: “Here’s to thee old apple tree.”

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Orchard near Preston on Wye, Herefordshire, Foxwhelp Morris Wassail 2012