She's Not My Granny, But She's Welcome In My Kitchen

Mmm... Delicious.  But not Golden Delicious.

The Granny Smith Apple.  Possibly the most popular apple in the world.  I mean, there are all sorts of drinks and other products that are 'green apple' flavoured, and I guarantee you that they're not talking about under-ripe Fujis.  How popular are Granny Smiths?  Have you ever seen the logo for the Beatles' recording company?  Yeah, they're bigger than Jesus (not really) and they chose the Granny Smith as the apple to represent them.

She's the one in the dress.

So, who the heck is Granny Smith anyway?  Why does she have an apple named after her?  Well, Maria Ann Ramsey Sherwood Smith (great name!) was a farmer who grew orchard fruit in Australia in the 1800's, specifically apples and pears, although her family did grow a few other vegetables as well.

 Her entire adult life, when she wasn't busy giving birth that is (she had nine kids, six of which survived childhood), she cultivated apples trying to grow  some that would grow better.  Pretty smart thing to do if you're living in an area which isn't particularly well suited to growing apples.  Her family's orchards were just Northeast of Sydney, Australia, which is very humid and very warm, and that's not so good for most varieties of apples.  So she tried growing hybrids, and her orchards did significantly better than most of the other orchards in the area.  But did that stop her from trying new things out?  Heck no!  I mean, what the hell else did she have to do as an apple grower in the 1800s?  Other than have kids, I mean.

Now, there's a couple stories about how she came up with the Granny Smith, but I like the one that hints at some sort of fate, so that's the one I'm going to tell (thankfully, it's also the most widely accepted version of events at the moment).

The story goes like this: Granny Smith (as she was called locally by this point in her life) was, in addition to being a great orchardist, also a wonderful baker, and her pies were particularly well known.  Not surprisingly, her apple pies most of all.  One day she bought some French crabapples from a chap who grew them in Tasmania, made a pie of them, and threw the cores and skins into a compost pile (I doubt that the term compost pile was used back then, but whatever) near a creek on her property.  Some time later she found a small tree growing out of the heap and associated it with the crabapples.  I guess she was happy with the way the pie had turned out, because she nurtured the sapling until it bore fruit, some time in 1868.  Quite pleased with the fruit of this new tree, which clearly wasn't the crabapples she was expecting, she showed it off to a neighbouring farmer.  They liked it too, and Granny started cultivating this new variety.

And then she died in 1870.  Long before there were enough mature trees for her to find out whether the fruit would turn out to be popular.  Which it was.  Several local orchardists started growing them, and they started winning awards about twenty years later.  By 1895, Albert H. Benson, an expert for the New South Wales Department of Agriculture said it was fit for export.  The next year he planted a full crop of them at the Bathurst Primary Industries Centre (then known more simply as the Bathurst Experimental Farm, or alternately as the Government Experimental Station, which sounds way more sinister), and from there?  It's all history.

Slow moving history, but history nonetheless.  England started growing them in the 1930s, and they started growing them in the United States in the 1970s.  And now?  Canada imports 16,000 tonnes of Granny Smith apples a year.

Granny Smith: She died without ever knowing just how awesome her found fruit was.

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Sources:
Apple image taken from Southwood Nursery
Maria Ann Smith image taken from the city of Ryde website
City of Ryde
Australian Dictionary of Biography
EzineArticles.com
FindAGrave.com
Wikipedia
Bathurst Primary Industries Centre
TheWorldGourmet.com