Crab Apples and What On Earth My Great Aunt Did With Them

One variety of crab apples.

When I was young, Mom said the crab apple trees Great Aunt Fern had planted years ago were good for nothing, and she didn’t care if I picked those apples or their blossoms, but I was never, ever to touch her prized, modern Transparent tree that grew on the edge of the orchard on our farm.

Yellow Transparents.

The Transparent grew large, juicy yellow apples that Mom cut up every August, soaked in salt water, and then measured into exact amounts for apple cobblers or apple pies, and plopped them into freezer bags and into the back room's 1940s freezer.

Beaver, my closet companion, trailed behind as I wandered through the orchard overgrown with burdocks, golden rod, and bushes with red branches. You could break off a red branch, stick a crab apple on the end, and fling it like a whip, making a whizzing sound. The neighbor boys and my brother and I would aim the apples for the trout pond beyond Dad’s potato field. Sometimes their apples would plop into the water. Mine never did.

At first I was only going to pick up two or three little apples, holding them in my hands, but then I got greedy and picked several handfuls, stuffing them into my pockets and some in my arms. They were all so pretty.

Beaver followed me back to the house where I washed the apples in Mom’s slate sink and used a paring knife to cut the apples on her wooden cutting board that you could pull out from under the counters, right above the flour and sugar bins. I didn’t cut off the skins because the apples were so small.

I pulled open the flour bin and mixed some flour with salt and water and made flat crusts to fit my junior pie tins that were a lot smaller than Mom’s. I wanted to try them out in a real oven. I sprinkled some sugar on top of the apples, rolled out more dough, and did the crisscross design on top.

Mom came in from the barns and asked what I was doing.

“Making crab apple pies.”

“What did you use in the dough?”

“Flour, water, and salt.”

She shook her head. “You forgot the shortening. Flour and water make glue. It’ll bake up as hard as nails and won’t be fit to eat. And the apples are too sour for pies.”

I sighed. All that work for nothing.

“You can bake them anyway,” she said, “and feed them to the dog.”

Mom's 1948 stove.

I felt better. Beaver’s mother was a German shepherd guard dog at Loring Air Force Base in nearby Limestone. That’s where Beaver had been born and named by a little boy who took care of her. Beaver worked hard guarding the farm and deserved a treat.

“I’ll help you with the oven,” Mom said.

She turned the porcelain knob to “On,” opened the oven door, and placed a wooden, lit match next to the bottom left and right sides. In less than a second, blue flames appeared.

She let the oven warm up. Then she placed the little pies on the black grate in the middle, closed the door, and turned the timer on for a few minutes. When it rang, I opened the oven door and looked at the golden pies with juice oozing out through the sides.

After they cooled a little, I tried a piece. It was sour and the crust was tough.

“Beaver will love them,” Mom said.

I took the pies outside to the corner of the lawn between the porch and the shed, next to the large hole that Joe and his friends had been digging for years. Joe said they were digging to China, but all they’d found so far were a few square-headed nails and some gray dirt he said was gun powder.

Stepping away from the hole, I gave Beaver first one pie and then the other. Mom was right—she loved them.

I wondered what Aunt Fern ever used those crab apples for. They must have been good for something.

Some time later, Beaver and I were exploring the house cellar pantry on a hot day when the cellar was cool and quiet.

I unlatched an old-fashioned metal hook on the front of a plain, wooden cabinet that sat in one corner of the pantry. Mom’s canned beans and cranberry jellies and sweet and sour pickles were all lined up on clean shelves on the other side of the room. But inside the old cabinet were shelves lined with canning jars sealed with rusted wires stuffed with bits of rags to keep them tight.

These weren’t Mom’s jars. They must have been Aunt Fern’s. Maybe Mom never dared to get rid of them, thinking Aunt Fern would return someday from Florida and want her canned goods back.

Aunt Fern's butter churn, also in the cellar.

Some jars held pickles. Others held things long deteriorated into globs of yucky stuff.

But on the second shelf were jars filled with little apples still on their stems. Crab apples. Aunt Fern had pickled them. And that is what she used them for.

And so, despite Mom’s declaration that crab apples were good for nothing, they had been good for something: to Aunt Fern, who loved foods mixed with vinegar; to me, who liked experiments; and to Beaver, who would eat anything.