Apples for picking

With the sun out, the day warm, and our daughter-in-law and granddaughter in tow, my wife and I drove north to Rhode Island's "Apple Valley" to pick the finest of pie apples, Northern Spies. These are among the many heirloom varieties, and according to what appears to be an authoritative website called Orange Pippin (www.orangepippin.com/)—itself, the name of a fine heirloom—the Spy originated in the Rochester, NY, area in the 1840s and was the handiwork of a farmer named Oliver Chapin. Alas, Chapin's discovery is hard to come by these days, especially in Southern New England. The Spy is really a northern apple, and there are only a handful of orchards close to home that grow them. When we arrived at our destination, we learned that the orchard only had two Northern Spy trees still in production and these, sigh, had been picked clean. We still had plenty of the more common apples, from Macs and Macouns to Cortlands and, of course, the current superstar, the Honeycrisp, to choose from, but no Spies. The Thanksgiving pies wouldn't be the same without the right variety, so we're just going to have to head north.