But today, cider is back.Īnd it’s more diverse, more accessible - and perhaps more American - than it’s ever been. A century ago, much of its popularity was wiped out by Prohibition. ![]() Before rum, before whiskey, hard cider was the American booze. He was, essentially, an American Dionysus : a nature-loving mystic who knew the power and joy of alcohol and sought to share it with as many as people as possible. Johnny Appleseed didn’t believe in grafting, and he wasn’t planting apples to feed the people: He was planting trees whose fruit was exclusively turned into hard cider and sometimes applejack - a 60 proof spirit culled from freezing hard cider. Anyone who wants edible apple plants grows grafted trees. Apples, Michael Pollan writes in Botany of Desire, the first chapter of which is dedicated to Chapman and apples, don’t “come true” from seeds: “An apple tree grown from seeds will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. The trees he planted, though, would never bear edible fruit, and everyone he encountered knew it. By the 1830s, Chapman ran a chain of apple tree nurseries running from western Pennsylvania through central Ohio and clear into Indiana. īut if there’s something the Disney-fied version of Johnny’s history gets dead wrong, it’s what those apples were for.īorn John Chapman on September 26th, 1774, in Leominster, Massachusetts, Johnny Appleseed headed west, on foot, at age 23, planting apple orchards wherever he landed. He was definitely as mystical and nature-loving as mythology purports him to be. Johnny Appleseed was very much a real person, and he most certainly walked halfway across the country planting apple seeds. ![]() ![]() Unlike those two legends, however, most of what we learned about Johnny Appleseed in grade school is true. In the hierarchy of American mythology, Johnny Appleseed ranks right up there with George Washington’s cherry tree and Paul Bunyan.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |