The Ancestor of the Red Delicious was Actually Delicious

It is Decidedly Not Delicious

    The Red Delicious apple, with its deceptive bright red hue and distinctive shape has been a popular apple in America for 128 years. Most of us remember getting one on our lunch trays in elementary school. But let’s face it, delicious it is not.

    I love apples. I have a special place in my world for each one. Each of them, but one.

    As I child I was not terribly picky about which apples I ate. My other classmates were though. They would hand their apples off to me and I would eat them all on my walk home at the end of the day. But the truly mealy, gritty ones—you know what I mean—would never survive more than a bite before getting chucked into a bush for the animals.

    Unless it was February. And winter. And I would eat the better bits around the mealy bits just for a taste of the fruit.

    I don’t feel so bad for my great distaste for the red delicious. Even Tom Burford, author of Apples of North America, whose ancestors planted seeds in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1713, and who grew up with over 100 species of apples in their family orchard refers to the popularity of the Red Delicious as a “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”

    Turns out, it wasn’t always disgusting.

 

Colonial Apples

    America had its own native apples, but the common varieties we know today are descendants of imports from Europe. Apples were important to colonial life. It was not only used for food, but hard cider, a safe beverage to imbibe, as the village water was usually unfit to drink.

    Apples were one of the earliest crops planted by colonists and each family would have a few trees of their own in their backyards. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, the popular apple was the Ben Davis, a reliable crop for growers. It was a pretty apple, and a crop with a reliable yield, but touted to be pretty bland.

 

What Jesse Hiatt Let Grow

    A Quaker farmer named Jesse Hiatt of Peru, Iowa found an unwanted apple tree growing within his orchard of Yellow Bellflower trees, in the 1870s. He tried to cut it back for several seasons but it came back up every year. History says that he decided something that tenacious deserved a chance and he let it grow.

    Ten years later the tree produced its first fruit, a red and yellow striped elongated globe. The flesh was said to be crisp, fruity and sweet, but it wasn’t pretty to look at. Hiatt named the perfumed apple the Hawkeye, after his home state. Amy Traverso, author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, says, “The [Hawkeye] was a chance seedling, and I like to imagine what a revelation it was to come across this apple tree that you hadn’t even planted. To taste the fruit for the first time and realize it was just incredible.”

 

The Next Big Apple

    The Ben Davis apple was the widely-seeded but bland apple in production at the time. In 1983 the Stark Brothers’ Nursery in Lousianna, Missouri, opened a contest to farmers, seeking a new strain of apple. Jesse Hiatt brought his Hawkeye apple to the contest. It was love at first bite and the Stark Brothers bought the production rights to the apple.

    The first thing they did was change the name.

 

The First Delicious

    It became the Stark Delicious.

    Rowan Jacobsen writes, in Apples of Uncommon Character, that “the fruit kept well and had an inoffensive, pleasantly aromatic taste. Most of all, it was very sweet. What it wasn’t, was solid red; instead, it had a light pink blush, reddish stripes, and a less pronounced strawberry shape, making it a pretty generic apple.”

    Over the next twenty years, the Nursery promoted the Stark Delicious in a manner that changed the business of apple production. The Brothers spent $750,000, sending salesmen to farms all over the country. They even sent it out as free gifts to their existing customers and exhibited it at the 1904 World’s Fair.

    The Stark Delicious became a hit and the Nursery was bombarded with requests for more trees from customers. As its population expanded, and it was propagated widely, it became less and less like the original Hiatt’s Hawkeye.

 

What’s in a Name?

    In 1914, when the Golden Delicious was discovered in West Virginia and bought up by the Nursery, the Stark Delicious apple became the Red Delicious. The Stark Brothers’ aggressive promotion of the breed meant that by 1922, the annual Delicious crop was valued at $12 million.

    A year later, one of the Delicious growers in New Jersey found one single branch on one of his trees that was producing a mutant variant of the apple. It had ripened earlier than the others and had turned a deep, solid crimson hue. One of the Stark Brothers’ sons travelled from Missouri and bought the branch, also known as a sport, off the tree for $6,000.

    “Traditionally, growers were paid based on the redness of the skin of their apples. Flavor was not evaluated,” Rowan Jacobsen wrote. “Red Delicious earned a premium over other apples, and the reddest Red Delicious earned the highest premium.” It wasn’t long before farmers all over clambered to get their hands on their own clone of the deep crimson variant.

 

Pros and Cons and Poor Taste

    Amy Traverson likens this as the problem. “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” she explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.”

    This new breed of Red Delicious came with a thicker skin that disguised the bruises that came during long shipping routes. The “coke-bottle bottom” of the fruit and the uniform shape made them perfect for storage and transport, prizing them for a long shelf life over taste. The deep red fruits continued to ripen after harvesting, so it could be picked prematurely and left to ripen in cold storage as it travelled.

    As soon as an apple is picked from the tree it begins to produce ethylene gas, which is what causes fruit to either ripen or rot. According to Simon Thibault, author of Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food, it enabled the Delicious apple to be stored for a length of time before being shipped.

 

Why So Popular?

    The Red Delicious was the most popular apple in production by the 1940s. But the skin was tougher than other apple skin, hiding an open-celled texture that consumers would consider mealy or gritty. It had a tough and bitter skin hiding mushy flesh. Have you ever wondered why that is?

    Thibault also says that if the Red Delicious is left on the tree long enough, something called watercore develops. “What that means is the starches and sugars get converted to sorbitol, or unfermentable sugar. They’re very sweet, but they don’t last long. If you let the Red Delicious do that, even the cardboard ones can become nonoffensive.” But then their shelf life for transport is severely shortened. As people left the farms and more people moved into the cities and shopped at grocery markets, and they were not getting their food from the farm stands, transportability became more important commercially.

    By the 1980s, seventy-five percent of the crops produced in Washington State were Red Delicious apples. They are responsible for two-thirds of the apples produced in America.

 

Who’s Buying Them?

    Now, the majority of Red Delicious apples are not bought by consumers. Instead they are sold to schools and health centers, hospitals and hotels; places where people don’t have a lot of choice in what they eat. For instance, the United States Department of Agriculture sends the fruit out through its food distribution programs, most of which comes from farmers’ surplus. The Red Delicious is usually one of the last crops standing, as far as American demand goes.

    Orchardists couldn’t just switch out their long-standing crops and the seemingly sudden shift in consumer demand took them by surprise. Tom Burford pointed out that people had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths.” Now shoppers were not satisfied with poor flavor when there were other savory apples on the market like SweeTango, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, and Snap Dragon.

 

The Decline

    Red Delicious apple growers lost almost $800 million between 1997 and 2000 because consumers weren’t buying them. In 2000 the government spent $138 million to bailout the apple farmers of Washington state. It was the largest bailout in the history of the apple industry.

    Production of the Red Delicious dropped forty percent over the next seventeen years. It is the parent of the Empire and the Fuji apple varieties, among others. It’s still one of the most commonly produced apples, by twenty million bushels, and in 2014, the Washington Apple Commission began focusing on exporting two-thirds or more of their Red Delicious crop to other countries. Most of our Red Delicious apples wind up in China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

    (Did you know that China produces a full half of the world’s apples, about eight times as much as the United States. Seventy percent of the apples they grow are Fujis.)

 

A New Cream of the Crop

    For the first time in fifty years, the Red Delicious was dethroned by the juicy and mildly sweet Gala in 2018. The Red Delicious came second—due to the production demand, Granny Smith was third, Fuji fourth, and the Honeycrisp fifth… though if they were correct, by the typing of this article the Honeycrisp should have moved up the list.

    Yum.

    Lots of farmers are slowly replacing their Red Delicious trees with new popular varieties and no one is planting new ones. Somewhere out there, some farmers still grow the original heirloom variety Hawkeye. Which means there is a chance to taste the fruit that was the Red Delicious’ ancestor, and experience where its name originated.

    I sense a road trip in my future.

 

 

 

Sourced with information from:

A.C. Bright, author of Apples Galore!

Tom Burford, author of Apples of North America

Rowan Jacobsen, author of Apples of Uncommon Character

Erika Janik, author of “Apple: A Global History”

Simon Thibault, author of Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food

Amy Traverso, author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook

LeAnn Zotta, author 200 Years and Growing: The Story of Stark Bro’s Nurseries & Orchards Co