Apple Review #16: Black Gilliflower

I just had a fruit fly in my coffee and that is bullshit, but one supposes that is the price I pay for eating apples in my office like a freak. Anyway, I just ate an apple that tastes, emotionally, like having fruit flies in my coffee, so let’s just jump right to it and get it done.

My review of the Black Gilliflower, aka Sheepnose apple, from Scott Farm (VT), mid-October:

I’ve had this apple and I’ve liked this apple and my experience this time was so wildly different that I’m feeling gaslit by the entire existence of apples.

And did I mention I have fruit flies eagerly working to drown themselves in my coffee this morning?

(As noted yesterday, context matters for reviews, so maybe I am perhaps bitterly affected by these little bastards. My mood, ruined! The reviews, forever altered! Alternatively, perhaps I am bitterly affected by the bitterness upon my tongue from this fucking clown-nose of an apple.)

(More on that in a second.)

Reportedly, this apple originates in America in the 1700s — in Connecticut. We won’t hold that against it. Though this apple may also have been brought over by settlers? The history here is murky. There is also some suggestion that this apple is one of the parents of the —

Wait for it —

Waaaaaait for it —

RED DELICIOUS APPLE.

Aka, the Fruit of Deception, the Judas Apple, the Dark Orb.

If that’s the case, it tracks: because there’s a flavor in this apple today that I have detected in Red Delicious in the past, and hint hint, the word rhymes with “bitter” wait crap I fucked that up sorry let’s try again, the word rhymes with “shitter” or “glitter” or “bitter” fuck I fucked it up again sorry, sorry.

Today, I bit into this thing and still got a sweet, subacid thing going on with, as some have described, a hint of clove — and also a curious absinthe smell. And that should already have given it a reasonable review, because none of that sounds precisely bad, yeah? Thing is, the chew was dense, like chewing a library book — not pages from a library book, but like, you shove the book in your mouth and start eating. And it dried out my mouth pretty quickly, too, as eating a book might.

The flavor abandoned me quickly.

Leaving me with wet paper mush in my mouth.

And then came this lingering bitterness, which is a flavor I’ve had with Red Delicious, too — this long-lasting, tongue-scraping alkaline sting, just sitting on your tongue like a puddle of shit that oozed out of a bad battery.

So, I had a second Black Gilliflower available — a name, by the way, that absolutely evokes some kind of dark fairy pact, doesn’t it? We went down to the ring of toadstools, and left a satchel of child’s teeth there in the center to appease ol Black Gilliflower — Gilly, who will piss on your crops and burn them dead if you don’t do her right with the teeth. Gilly, who, should you throw in a few extra teeth, might bless the harvest with the frothy green milk from her turnipy teats.

Anyway, I ate the second one.

And it was way worse than the first!

It fucked my mouth up. It was olive brine and gym sweat. It was a teenage boy’s unwashed laundry pile. And the bitterness that lingered was almost numbing. And not in a fun Szechuan peppercorn way but in a “my tongue is shutting down because it hates this” way.

So I’m pretty sure these were very poor representations of an otherwise pretty solid apple, but the review gods must be appeased, and I’m not reviewing the memory of a better apple but rather, the apples I ate. I’d say the first one was a 3/10, the second a 0/10, so we’ll even it out to a probably unfair but too bad 1.5 outta 10.

I must’ve offended ol’ Black Gilliflower.

I will make amends and try again.

AS A SIDENOTE, guess who procured for himself not one, but two Red Delicious apples? One from a local orchard, one from a grocery store.

I’ll do a double review, see where we land with that most accursed apple in our fruitsack, the Liar’s Heart itself, the Red Motherfucking Delicious.

(Oh, and the books at the top: Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey, which is the best thing she’s written, and that’s saying something, plus the excellent Fiend by Alma Katsu and Sam Rebelein’s The Poorly Made and Other Things, which I’ve yet to read but am assured it will be delightful.)

Video review: here.

Fruit flies: still in my coffee.

Black Gilliflower: Perhaps unrepresentative of its ilk, today it tasted like licking the bitter tears and streaked greasepaint off an angry, drunken clown’s messy woestruck face, frozen in the rictus of revelation, the moment the clown realizes “I am a clown, what did I do in my life to get here, and there is no way to turn back now, no chance to undo the mistakes that culminated in me turning into not merely a metaphorical clown, but an actual literal holy shit clown with the honking noses and the big stupid shoes, oh fuck”

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette