Apple Review #7: Cox’s Orange Pippin

Finally, we get to truly, truly, one of my most favoritest apples: the small-but-mighty Cox’s Orange Pippin. Some real hobbit shit right here.

First, though, a brief shilling:

Scott Farm, in Vermont. This is unpaid. They are not a sponsor. I am not receiving free apples from them even though I am a bonafide applefluencer. (When the Cosmic Crisp released, I received a free box of them. That’s it. That’s the extent of my applefluencerness. IT COUNTS SHUT UP.)

They will ship apples to you. I assume this is easier and cheaper if you’re on the East Coast, but I think they ship nationwide? Don’t quote me on that. Either way, you get a really, really nicely packaged box of 12 or 18 heirloom apples — three of each of their current cultivars. It’s good stuff. I’ve been there, too, and that’s the real magic: it’s this quaint out of the way farm store and orchard. They have lunch and cider and also shit-ton of gloriously weird apples, and when I went there were a handful of dudes out there playing bluegrass. It was cool. Go there. Vermont.

(And when you do go, you can also go to Madame Sherri’s castle, which is an old staircase in the woods, and yes, I’m going to briefly turn this into a promo for me, me, me, because how else am I going to afford all these fancy fucking apples? Staircase in the Woods is on sale right now for $2.99 at any of the places where you get your digital electrobookery. Which is to say, Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amz, Apple, B&N, etc. If you want a print book, signed and personalized, as always, Doylestown Bookshop has you covered. And since I can’t stop reminding you of things, remember I’m at D-town this weekend, Sunday, with T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, aka a very cool person and awesome author okay whew.)

Cox’s Orange Pippin was one of the first heirloom apples I tastes way back when I first started eating these rarer, stranger fruits — and it was really one of the ones that changed the game for me. A truly GOATed apple over here.

It’s not quite as old a variety as you might think, since some apples are sourced back to the 1600s — this one is late 1800s. A very British apple, even in its name. It sounds like a peculiar British expression, something you say to express exclamation. “Cox’s Orange Pippin, that’s good spotted dick!” It may come from the Ribston Pippin, who I’m pretty sure was a suitor in a Jane Austen novel. Regardless of where it comes from, it has certainly spawned a great many apple children — dozens of varieties, including but not limited to the Rubinette, the Golden Gooselump, the Laxton’s Epicure, the Nuvar Freckles, the Rosey Rumprusset, the Cobra, the Clivia, the Clarkleton Express, the Acme, the Edith Hopwood, the Millicent Barnes, the Grand Dame Activia, the William Crump, and more. I may have made some of those up. I bet you can’t easily tell which.

Anyway, fuck it, let’s eat this apple.

My review of a late September Cox’s Orange Pippin from Scott Farm, VT:

A pineapple fucked a pear and somehow made a baby that looks like an apple. That is the Cox’s Orange Pippin apple.

It is a weirdly sunshiney tropical apple, which I assume gave early Brits the fits, since they were used to eating fog and barnacles and sheep guts, and then suddenly along comes an apple that tastes like the antithesis to scurvy.

It’s crunchy and crispy and juicy. Sweet and tart is in, for me, perfect balance. Slicks your lips. Tingles the tongue.

The skin is orange, and if you don’t believe me, this is a color picker grab from the middle of the apple —

And if I drop the saturation of orange out of the apple, you get:

See? Orange. Doesn’t taste like it, but rather, exhibits the colors of it — that said, there’s also no denying the tropical, almost citrus component to it.

I’d usually give this a ten — it is for me pretty much the perfect apple. But in this instance, I’d say I was hoping it would be a scootch crunchier. And also, in the aftertaste was this odd umami MSG flavor that lingered a bit — not exactly unpleasant, but a little unusual, which let’s say dented the apple’s perfect score a bit. I’m being picky, but fuck it, that’s the whole point of this — there is the chance I will eat a different Cox’s Orange Pippin, even from the same batch, and it’ll get me to a perfect glorious ten, and the angels did sing.

(I note here too that while these reviews are purely for the “eating-of-of-hand” apple snack gang experience, this also makes for a solid pie, cobbler, sauce. But why would you when you can just shove it in your mouth.)

So, yeah. It’s a 9 out of 10 for this guy.

Video here.

(Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush)

Cox’s Orange Pippin: eat the apple and you can’t help but say, “Cox’s Orange Pippin, thassa real corker of an apple, innit!”