APPALACHIAN APPLE MAGIC

Harvested from backyards and back roads, fall’s most beloved fruit shines in these simple desserts that taste like home

- SHERI CASTLE,VICTOR PROTASIO,EMILY NABORS HALL,CHRISTINA DALEY

WHEN I THINK OF APPLES IN APPALACHIAN COOKERY, the image starts in a house, usually in the kitchen but possibly on a porch or carport, where weathered metal dishpans, wooden crates, or peck baskets sit all around, brimming with fruit ready to be worked up. Some people use one of those peeler-corer contraptions that clamp onto a counter, but I put great store in cooks who skip the gadgets. In their knowing hands, a stubby paring knife, often with a blade worn into a thin scythe, can quickly spin the skin off an apple in one long ribbon. When I was little, my grandmother and aunts told me that if I dropped an unbroken one over my left shoulder, it would fall into the shape of the initial of someone who had a crush on me. Entranced by their mountain woman magic and playful augury, I must have studied yards of those curlicues while I was growing up. Let me tell you—anyone determined to see a letter, perhaps one that’s already in mind, will.

What I didn’t understand until later, after I started cooking, was that the real mountain magic lay in the apples and the recipes we made with them. My beloved Appalachia is home to hundreds of storied heirloom kinds, which once sprawled all over the South. We’ve lost many over time, but some are coming back into popularity thanks to orchardists and cooks who look out for them—and then look after them. Johnny Appleseed meant well, but only grafting can perpetuate a variety—something that humans have known how to do for over 2,000 years—and it’s a skill I watched my granddaddy ply in our own backyard. We had three trees, but more than a dozen different apples grew on their branches, like a gallery of good flavors. As my friend Diane Flynt, a noted orchardist and author of