Tragedy! At The Apple Disco, AKA Apple Review #39: D’Arcy Spice

A fun thing that sometimes happens is this: you eat a food, any kind of food, and then after eating that food, some manner of stomach bug — a bonafide gut goblin — besieges your gastrointestinal castle, and sooner than later, you’re bent over, howling paeans and prayers to the porcelain altar.

Now, you and I logically know that the last food you ate was almost certainly not the food that made you sick. Honestly, a lot of times we say oh I got food poisoning, but we have no way of even knowing that. You might have touched a doorknob that was previously touched by some poop-fingered barbarian who wipes with cheap paper and tends to poke his little digits through when he does his downstairs cleaning! You just don’t know. All you really know is, goblin particles somehow got in me, and now they really want to get out of me.

Thing is, logic really doesn’t have a lot to do with our, erm, gut reactions to stuff, does it? Logic tends to take a back seat to our mammalian inclinations.

And so, what happens, I find, is that sometimes the last thing you ate, in its transformation as the next thing you’re ejecting from your body, becomes tainted in your mind for some variable period of time. We’ve all experienced this, I assume, in some form. Ever been too drunk on something and then inevitably you have to HURRRRK that booze-sauce back up and even now, decades later, when you catch a whiff of that specific brand of devil’s drink and your entire body is like nope nope no uh-uh not today, Satan? When I was in my 20s I yarfed up some pepperoni pizza and I was put off pepperoni pizza for a good year — and that’s not nothing, because pepperoni pizza may very well be a perfect food. A couple years ago I ate a bunch of ketchup chips from Wegmans and, sure enough, got THE ICK that night annnnnd I’ll bet you fifty bucks I’ll never eat ketchup chips again. They didn’t make me sick! The pizza didn’t either. But your body is like, hey, I’m gonna be super suspicious of that food for a while, yeah?

Cut to Monday night, this week.

I had for my nightlytime snack a little apple puff pastry tart I’d made with leftover LucyGlo apples.

Then I went upstairs.

And then, in the night, the barf goblins found me.

Of course the predominant thing I blearghed up was —

FUCKING APPLE TART.

Apples! My food! My precious food!

Betrayal! Not by the apples, no, no, but by me, by my foul and detestable body, betraying me and my one true love, apples.

Thankfully, I don’t seem quite as put off my apples as I am by the cinnamon — that was the, ahh, predominant flavor coming back up. And, you know, if I may, I will say if you have a food that has to return, cinnamon isn’t the worst. It’s kind of festive! An autumnal purging! A potpourri of human ejecta!

Anyway, so I’m a little put off apple-related things for a while — particularly if cinnamon is involved.

That said, I still have eaten a bunch of apples, have catalogued those apples, and am still gonna be reviewing those apples here.

Which leads me to what is something of an ironic review, given the flavor profile of the apple I’m about to talk about…

My review of a D’Arcy Spice apple from Scott Farm (VT), late-Nov:

LOOKIT THE TINY ITTY BITTY WIDDY BABBY OF AN APPLE.

AW, I WANNA PINCH HIS WIDDLE APPLE CHEEKS

Ahem. Sorry.

So! The D’Arcy Spice! Which is to say, the apple, and not the subgenre of smutty Jane Austen fics. It is in fact a little apple, and quite a dense boy, as well. Honestly, a bit hard to break into, like the money room at a casino. So, it’s tiny, and rock-hard, and once you manage to crack that nut… is it worth the trouble?

It is. This is next in the line of truly odd little apples I’ve eaten of late. There are some big funky flavors afoot here tucked into this tiny package of dense white flesh. Sweet dominates tart here (I prefer when tart dominates sweet, don’t kinkshame), but then you get this host of complex “spice” flavors. I was searching for which of those spice flavors is dominant, and it took me a while to settle on nutmeg. This is a very nutmeggy apple! Little allspice, little cinnamon, but really, it’s nutmeg-forward in some fascinating ways. It’s one of the things I really like about the diversity of apples — you can get apples that taste like pineapple, or bubblegum, or far more autumnal with true spice, spice that hasn’t ever touched the tree and yet there it be, in the fruit.

I’m told this is a fairly delicate and hard-to-grow apple, a dainty sensitive boy, and shame for that, because they’re small and fun to eat and a little weird in the wonderful way of being weird, not the horrible way of being weird.

As such, I’m gonna go ahead and call this a happy 7.4.

No video, I’m afraid, as I totally borked that. Oops! You’ll live.

D’Arcy Spice: Little sweet nutmeg lad

Reviews in 2025: 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, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford, Ananas Reinette, Sugarbee, Granny Smith, LucyGlo/LucyRose, Ludacrisp