On September 26 1774, Johnny Appleseed was Born
...and went on to spread booze throughout the frontier
The apple has seen some tough days. It’s the malicious culprit in loads of folklore. What knocks out Snow White? What has Adam ruin the lot for humankind (according to medieval art, not the bible)? And is it the Golden Pear of Discord or the Golden Banana of Discord that sparks the Trojan War? No, it’s the Golden Apple of Discord.
Despite its evident tendency to introduce ruin and mayhem, the apple was a constant in my early life. They made their way into my oatmeal and lunches. They were offered under the suspiciously-rhyming decree that one a day would definitively forbid the approach of a certified healthcare professional. Throughout the year, apple culture peaked around October. We bobbed for apples at our school Halloween festival. We lost teeth in caramel-covered apples, where they stood like crooked little tombstones. And in September, a class trip to Steyer’s Orchards introduced me to the glories of apple cider. (The next day, spent entirely on the toilet, stomach acids swirling after two jugs of cider, I was introduced to consequences of actions. And the importance of two-ply toilet paper.)
One positive story about apples came from the folk character Johnny Appleseed. He was a simple frontiersman who wore threadbare clothing, wore a tin pot hat, and wandered and seeded the frontier with apple trees. The real man was John Chapman, born in 1774 in Massachusetts and raised in Pennsylvania. The legend isn’t far off from reality. He collected seeds from Pennsylvania cider mills and roamed the frontier delivering apple seed to families and starting nurseries. He walked around barefoot and slept rough. He was very kind to people and animals and became a vegetarian in later years. This was remarkable at a time when most people ate whatever they could to get calories in an American wilderness notably bereft of Trader Joes.
But Johnny Appleseed wasn’t simple. He created nurseries, which he fenced in and for which he hired caretakers. He returned a couple of times a year to work on them. By the time he died in 1845, he owned more than 1,200 acres of valuable frontier land. Moreover, contrary to the Disney version of Johnny Appleseed, he wasn’t bringing people apples for food, he was bringing them apples for booze.
The first apples sprung up as malus sieversii in the mountains of Kazakhstan. And no doubt the first person to bite into one never did so again. They are so bitter that they were only marginally preferable to dying of hunger. So people didn’t eat them, but they did press the hell out of them and let the resulting juice ferment. There’s no record of who first realized fermented apple cider made you drunk enough to tongue kiss a woolly mammoth, but by the time the Romans show up in the British isles in 55 AD, the people there were drinking a cider-like beverage and developing the rules for mob football. The Germanic tribes and the Normans were drinking similar beverages, and the Romans spread this newfound elixir throughout their entire empire. And Europe and the Mediterranean were drunk on apples.
It doesn’t stop there. Apple seeds traveled the Atlantic with the first colonists to the New World. The colonists preferred beer and there’s evidence that the Mayflower’s trip was cut short so they could grow grains to make it. However, having chosen the sandiest, shallowest, and stoniest soil this side of Mars, they had more luck planting apple trees and making cider. Cider became popular because apple trees grew well in New England, cider was safer than drinking water, and being drunk helped them forget the 1-in-2 chance they had of dying at any given moment on any given day. So by the time Johnny Appleseed came meandering down the lane petting animals and planting seeds, the apple was well-established as a useful and essential fruit.
Though apples became part of the colonial diet, the only way to breed edible apples was through grafting – literally placing a bud chip (of, say, a Red Delicious apple) onto a compatible rootstock. Apples trees grown by planting seeds produces apples so “sour that it could set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” But Johnny Appleseed was from the Swedenborg Church, which believed that grafting apples harmed the plant, so he would only plant seeds to grow apples. This meant that Johnny’s apples couldn’t have been used for food, they were used for booze.
To say that Mr. Appleseed’s frontier clientele were OK with that fact is to use the understatement of the century. People on the American frontier probably viewed life through perennially drunken eyes. They drank alcohol morning, noon, and night, with shots in between to pass the time. Did this fact make it harder to hunt, to get home after hunting, or to locate your fingers after you blew them off during hunting? Yes. Probably. But the risks were taken for the more pragmatic uses of apple alcohol. People used Johnny’s seeds to grow apples and those apples to make hard cider or applejack. Applejack is an apple brandy also known as Jersey Lighting as it was first produced in colonial New Jersey. When taken in large quantities it makes extremely bad ideas seem like very good ones, like, among others, living in New Jersey. Hard cider offered more than a buzz, as it provided vitamins and nutrition for people who would likely be stuck in a cabin for four freezing, wintry, snowy months on the frontier. One could summon this nutrition for the energy needed to fight the two thousand four-legged beasts stalking the outside of the cabin that wanted to eat one’s face off. Also, it was a safer alternative to water. Thus it kept them from getting painful stomach illnesses and diarrhea, which, when combined with being stuck in a cabin for four months surrounded by wild animals, sounds like something cooked up by Dante to punish those who sell gym memberships.
The hard cider and applejack remained popular in the colonies until Germans and Dutch settlers came to America and lured people back to beer. Applejack dropped off after more easily distilled hard alcohols like rum or whiskey were developed and introduced to the colonies. Johnny Appleseed died in 1845 from exposure. His death was noted to be quick and surprising. He left thousands of acres of nurseries and orchards in his wake. A legacy of the resilience, toughness, and knowhow of young America. In the 1920s, that legacy was smashed when prohibition rampaged the land, and temperance advocates called for apple trees to be cut down so people wouldn’t be tempted to make cider, a thing as Kazakh as apple pie.
How to celebrate the birth of Johnny Appleseed and his influence on the lacking sobriety of early American colonists? With an applejack-spiked hot cider, that’s how. Now, just to be clear, you could pull on a bottle of applejack for an hour or so and it’ll turn you into the Tom Brady talented, George Clooney lookalike you become when drinking. But not only will an applejack-spiked hot cider help you celebrate Johnny Appleseed and apple booze’s place in American history, it’s also a great way to warm up in the increasingly chilly autumn nights. Two boozy birds, one boozy stone.
Applejack-Spiked Hot Cider
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
- 10 black peppercorns
- 5 whole cloves
- 2 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks
- Some kind of berries I never heard of and therefore omitted because the chances that you have these berries handy is as likely as you having a crème brûlée torch or you getting to the end of this sentence without feeling as though I’ve wasted at least a little of your life. There. See?
- 6 cups apple cider
- 1 tablespoon honey
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 (2-inch) orange rind strips
- 2 (2-inch) lemon rind strips
- ¾ cup applejack brandy (keep more of this on hand)
- YouTube video of Denis Day as Johnny Appleseed
- A very high threshold for hokey Americana
- Pretzels
Directions
Melt butter in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Make sure nobody’s around, drink the butter (nobody’s judging) and then add two more tablespoons and melt that. Stir in sugar and the peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon sticks. Cook for 1 minute, smell that elixir, drool, wipe. Add cider, honey, vanilla, orange and lemon rinds, and then bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 15 minutes. While waiting, take a few pulls from the applejack just to make sure it wasn’t damaged en route to your house. Then remove the elixir from heat and stir in applejack. Strain out and discard solids. Put on a sweater, sit by a fire or a window, look outside and be happy the only threatening wild animal out there is your neighbor’s chihuahua. Drink to Johnny Appleseed, to being nice to animals, and to the Apple of Content.