The apple – an underused treasure

Autumn is often accompanied by a sense of food waste. Every time I pass a garden and see an apple tree surrounded by a huge number of windfalls, I think: So unnecessary. Many people immediately get creative ideas about taking care of fruit in and under the tree. Maybe do a cider? Perhaps biogas if you scale the issue to a sustainability level?

Ancient but modest

The apple is old in Sweden. Even though the Vikings ate it, it had a modest role for most people in older Swedish food culture. Crabapple and other varieties were found, but the more noble and cultured apples were precious. In the household's accounts, apples are found already in the 16^th century. In the 1500s Hans Brask, the bishop of Linköping, ate whole apples both as an accompaniment to meat stews and of course to the old cheese after the Christmas dinner.

The apples belonged to the food culture among church people and nobility, but was also a part of the bourgeois gardens. In Karin Hallgren's dissertation (2016) about vegetable growing in Sweden in the 18^th century, it says that fruit trees of different kinds were found in the kitchen gardens. In the 1700s we start to import Dutch apple trees. In addition to apples, other popular fruits were plums, cherries and pears. To this day, homeowners in Sweden often have many kinds of apple trees.

The breakthrough

During the 19^th century, apple cultivations were commercial and mansions invested heavily in southern Sweden. The fruits was sent to the cities and a processing industry was also created.

An explanation for the breakthrough of apples in smaller farms and working homes was a change in winter storage. In the 19^th century, underground storehouses became common at sawmills and ironworks and large-scale underground storehouses were built for the workers. Now, both apples and potatoes could be stored easily during wintertime.

The cheap industrial sugar also meant that apples could be stored in the form of apple sauce. Otherwise, dried apple slices were the most common storage method. They were then used to make fruit cream, something that became very common after the breakthrough of the potato flour.

Not adult beverages

No major apple cider production has ever occurred in Sweden. After 1923, when the state introduced a monopoly of all spirits and fruit wine production in Sweden, the state dropped most private-owned producers. The state did not want to have any fruit wine production as it was too expensive to maintain the fruit wine competence necessary to monitor quality.

With the closures, a centuries-old Swedish tradition of berries and fruit drinks with alcoholic content vanished and has not yet come back. One exception is a high-quality producer, Knutstorp Manor, which continued making its Sparkling until 1970. It was a wine usually made of white currants and gooseberry, but also apples.

Instead, sodas like Pommac, Guldus, Pomril (Swedish soda brands) and sweet children ciders came to dominate the domestic apple drinks.

The everyday habit that disappeared

The apples were also an everyday food. Until the 1970s, most of the Swedes enjoyed dessert every day. Families ate apple sauce with cream, apple sauce with milk and long rows of apple pies with vanilla sauce in the fall. However, later Swedes began to think that desserts were unnecessary as they wanted to lose weight. And here the apple tree's surplus started to be a problem.

Research for reduced food losses

Marie Olsson, Professor at the Department of Plant Processing at SLU in Alnarp, is studying apple waste.

­– New methods are needed to reduce the mould growth in both conventional and organic apple farming, Marie Olsson says.

In an ongoing project, eco-spraying of apples is now being investigated using "spices". The spices consist of the substance thymol (found in thyme) and eugenol (found in cloves). The research looks promising. A doctoral student will now examine how to determine maturity more precisely for Swedish apple varieties and then parry the contradictory taste and storage variables. As for the consumers, they want to have apples picked at their highest level of taste. At the same time, it is important that they are not so mature that they rot in storage.

Gardening tips

For us everyday apple growers, Marie Olsson gives the tip of collecting all windfall since mould can survive and spread from there. You also want to remove the “mummy fruits”, the dry, sandy grey apples, as they are contagious. One important thing to reduce future losses is, of course, that we eat more apples. This could be through developing cider production in Sweden, but also new apple products.

– We also need to decide what we are going to do with physically and aesthetically un-accomplished apples, concludes Marie Olsson.

Multifaceted taste

The apple's taste is amazing. Sweet and at the same time sour, aromatic fruity with tones of lemon and melon, sometimes a bit bitter to give character.

Strangely enough, we have songs about the shape of the apple. The text line in an old Christmas carol reads: "Staffan rides on the best apple grey horse”. Apple grey refers to a gray horse with bright, apple-sized spots. The oldest Christmas carol about Staffan that refers to apple grey is from the 16^th century. That Staffan got such a beautiful horse also says something about the reputation of the fruit.

But what is the reputation of the apple today? Do we see the potential of this everyday fruit? If we do not manage to eat and drink all apples, we should at least use them in another way. You can drive about a kilometer on one kilo of apples that have been converted to biogas. In the compost they can turn into new soil, so we can grow more food. The apple is an ongoing Swedish food history with a bright future.

Richard Tellström, meal researcher
SLU Future Food