We’ve had our first two brushes with frost, and the time now feels right to be lighting up the cookstove in the morning. That means it’s applesauce and oatmeal season on the farm. It started a bit late this year. Not that we don’t have the apples and the oatmeal. We do. But the tomatoes have been excellent, and eggs poached in cooked tomatoes is hard to beat. But even though we still have tomatoes, the apples beckon.
Norton Greening
The apples for today’s sauce are Norton Greenings, one of my favorite midseason cooking apples. It’s a large, thin-skinned, light yellow, faintly blushed, roundish-conic fruit that quickly cooks into a smooth, tart, light-yellow, creamy sauce. The skins and core dissolve into nearly nothing. Where do they go? They vaporize. When you strain it through the Foley Food Mill, there’s nothing left but a few random seeds. Two or three Norton Greenings is plenty for one breakfast. Cut them up, put them in a small sauce pan with a bit of water and stick them on the stove. A second small sauce pan gets the oatmeal. Before long you’ve got your morning meal.
I first visited the tree we call Norton Greening with Robert McIntyre—aka Roberto—on what may have been our first Harpswell fruit exploring adventure together. The story I recalled was that Norton Greening was a seedling planted on the day of the birth of Helen Norton back in the 1930’s. I contacted Roberto’s widow Dorothy Rosenberg this morning to see what she knew. Dorothy wrote back to me that,
“Hannah Norton told us [Robert and Dorothy] about the apple, which she said was an excellent baking apple, that you and Robert took samples and later scions from and dubbed the Norton Greening. [That may mean I named it!] …
“According to Hannah (Helen Norton's sister-in-law), the tree grew from a wild sapling near the old Norton farm house when she was a child. We checked, but didn't find any graft mark. The original tree died several years ago…
“The Norton family has been in Harpswell since the 1740s, with a large farm and property on Harpswell Neck. Robert and I found a number of old trees on parts of the old farm that have been reclaimed by the forest. Helen and Walter Norton are well known philanthropists supporting conservation and environmental work in Maine. So it is nice to have their name preserved with the apple variety.”
Meanwhile it rained off and on all day today. A perfect day for applesauce and oatmeal. We need the rain.