“The fame of the Maryland apple is perhaps less known at home than in distant markets. The Maryland apple has never figured to any great extent in the lobster palaces in the Broadway section in New York at $1 per apple. It is a good apple, nevertheless.” – The Baltimore Sun, 1911
A Baltimore fruit merchant, U. Grant Border, posed a fascinating question in 1913: “Can King Apple be so advertised as to increase the consumption from year to year sufficiently to provide a profitable market for the great and steadily-increasing crops?” He believed that the answer was yes, and started a plan to form a sort of fund for apple-farmers to pool their money for national advertising campaigns.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” had been an old Welsh adage for a few decades by that time. Originally it has the somewhat more spiteful wording “eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”
Grant, now a bona-fide “ad man,” continued to tout the health benefits of the apple, but he took it a step beyond. In 1912 he was quoted in many newspapers declaring that women should eat apples “morning, noon and night” to make their complexions more beautiful.
Tonoloway Mountain apple orchard, 1948 by A. Aubrey Bodine
His organization, the International Apple Shippers Association, declared October 31st “Apple Day.” When that wasn’t good enough, they dedicated an entire Apple Week. The Baltimore Fruit Producers’ Association held an event where they gave away 1000 apples. In two of the apples was a $5 gold piece. (That’s about $75 nowadays.)
Meanwhile, across the country, Lucy Gertrude MacKay was also making a career of apples. She had been conducting demonstrations on “apple cookery” since the early 1900s.
Baltimore Sun, 1911
U. Grant Border may have attended the National Apple Show in Spokane Washington, where MacKay was peddling a book of apple recipes. One way or another, they teamed up and published “197 Ways to Cook Apples” in 1915. MacKay went on to expand the book into “209 Ways of Serving the Apple for Table Use,” and eventually “The Housekeeper’s Apple Book.” (I guess she lost count.)
I found that final book on archive.org and made “Apples En Surprise” – apples stuffed with Maraschino cherries and pecan bits. In the early 1900’s, “Maraschino Cherry” could refer to the original luxury Maraschino cherries from Croatia, or to something similar to the imitation version that we now know today. There had been some controversy about the purity and safety of the cheaper, dyed-red maraschino cherries, but they were still wildly popular.
The process used to create modern “maraschino cherries” wasn’t developed until 1925, so I went ahead and used some fancy Luxardo cherries which I had been hoarding for just this sort of thing.
U. Grant Border & L. Gertrude MacKay may have successfully expanded the market for apples in the United States, but Border’s prediction that the market could expand every year would be impossible, even if women did eat apples “morning, noon and night.”
Abandoned apple orchards appear throughout Western Maryland, melding with the landscape, feeding the deer. There are still plenty of Maryland apples to be had at Farmer’s Markets or pick-your-own orchards. They may not conceal any gold nuggets, but there’s lots of autumnal enjoyment to be had trying a few of the hundreds of ways to serve them.
Recipe:
Make apple cups by cutting a thick slice from the stem end and removing the pulp with a teaspoon. Fill the cups with equal quantities of the apple pulp, pecan meats, and Maraschino cherries cut into small pieces. Add one teaspoon of sugar to each apple and bake until the apples are soft, but will hold their shape. Remove from the oven and add one teaspoon of Maraschino and one teaspoon of sherry to each cup.
Recipe from “The Housekeeper’s Apple Book” by Lucy Gertrude MacKay
