Abundance: Pender's Season of Apples < The Happy Monk Baking Company

It’s hard to overstate my reverence for The Apple!

A perfect globe, a happy fruit that sits perfectly in hand. Its gentle heft, its smooth skin, even with imperfections, is beauty in itself. It’s a joy to behold, coloured brightly with reds, greens, yellows and a multitude of hues in between. Bring it to your nose and breathe in its fragrance. It’s surely passed through heavenly realms here to earth, bringing scents with them, arrayed in layered splendour, essence of the divine. And the flavours when you bite into them, the splash of juice, the tang and sweetness in the mouth …

Essence of the divine

It’s apple season here on Pender, Island of Apples! The time when these nuggets of ambrosia hang off trees, bending branches. They’re ready to break free and fall off into grassy loam, the soft earth. Those trees that helped bear them, nourish them, sustain them.

Last Friday, at the Medicine Beach bread pick-up, Andy Nowak and Mary Reher showed up with several boxes of apples, many varieties. They will become this week’s Pender Island Apple Bread. Their glorious fruit will be peeled, sliced and dehydrated to concentrate their sweetness. They will be tossed into the sourdough. Hydrated with Pender’s own Twin Island Cider, they’ll make the annual Happy Monk Apple Bread.

It’s a welcome indulgence for me, making bread that glorifies this noble fruit, celebrating one of this island’s perfect creations. When I hold one of Andy and Mary’s apples, I see where they’re from: Black Rabbit Farm just off Pirates Road. The garden/orchard is condensed beauty, neatly laid out. The tiered garden, the vegetables, the flowers, the rustic roadside fence, the tool shed, the hill rising upwards into tall firs and cedars. And the row of small apple trees, loaded with fruit, large and small, red, yellow, green and orange.

Lost and found apples

But apple trees are all over Pender! Our neighbours along Gowlland Point Road have towering King apple trees that must drop tons of fruit yearly. Another neighbour, a true apple devotee from Bristol, once had 40 different varieties of trees, including Bramleys, Pippins, Gravensteins and Liberties.

Not forgetting the bigger ones, Olde Apple Orchard, Corbett House Orchard, Raven Rock Farms, all in the Port Washington area, Roesland Orchard, Shingle Bay and in backyards of countless homes.

Ask the Twin Island Cider proprietors, Matt Vasilev and Katie Selbee, who know all the orchards. They’ll even tell you about the hidden ones. These are orchards long forgotten and grown over and the Vasilev/Selbees lovingly clear, rescue, and turn into producing orchards.

And I remember stopping on Hooson Road a few years ago after spotting an apple tree off the side of the road, rising out of a thicket of grass and brambles, teeming with luscious fruit. Many were strewn on the grass, spilling into the ditch. Jennifer and I picked a few, cleaned them off and feasted on the way home in the car.

Eating apples: an act of conscience

Apples are abundant and plentiful on Pender Island. There are so many apples falling off trees! It’s an act of conscience, almost, to eat as many as possible so they don’t go to waste. An easy task, a pleasurable duty, an altruistic act with delightful benefits.

They can be made into comforting apple pies, or course, or apple crisps, betties 1, apple jam or butter or candied apples for Halloween. But to my mind, the fruit’s simplicity is a little lost when it’s baked.

Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, revered the apple so much, in its simplicity and innocence, that he believed it had the power to unite the globe if we only had the vision, the appetite, the tastebuds. Biting into an apple and its “round innocence,” he said, we “regress for a moment to the state of the newborn.” It’s the reverse of Eve’s bite of the Apple, the fruit of knowledge. It’s not a loss of innocence, but a return to innocence!

Have an apple today! Taste the fruit of innocence, be it a Liberty, an Ambrosia, an Elstar or a Golden Russet. Savour it, love it. Do your bit to save the world!

Ode to an Apple

By Pablo Neruda

You, apple,
are the object
of my praise.
I want to fill
my mouth
with your name.
I want to eat you whole.

You are always
fresh, like nothing
and nobody.
You have always
just fallen
from Paradise:
dawn’s
rosy cheek
full
and perfect!

Compared
to you
the fruits of the earth
are
so awkward:
bunchy grapes,
muted
mangos,
bony
plums, and submerged
figs.
You are pure balm,
fragrant bread,
the cheese
of all that flowers.

When we bite into
your round innocence
we too regress
for a moment
to the state
of the newborn:
there’s still some apple in us all.

I want
total abundance,
your family
multiplied.
I want
a city,
a republic,
a Mississippi River
of apples,
and I want to see
gathered on its banks
the world’s
entire
population
united and reunited
in the simplest act we know:
I want us to bite into an apple.
Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda, Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004

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Essence of the divine

Lost and found apples

Eating apples: an act of conscience

Ode to an Apple

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