I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.
— Plato, Epigram VII
Apples.
What can we say about them?
Apples appear in many religious traditions, often as a mystical or forbidden fruit. One of the problems identifying apples in religion, mythology and folktales is that the word “apple” was used as a generic term for all (foreign) fruit, other than berries, including nuts, as late as the 17th century.
Let’s start with the biblical story of Eve, who plucked the fruit despite God’s prohibition.
Although the forbidden fruit of Eden in the Book of Genesis is not identified, popular Christian tradition has held that it was an apple that Eve coaxed Adam to share with her. The origin of the popular identification with a fruit unknown in the Middle East in biblical times is found in wordplay with the Latin words mālum (an apple) and mălum (an evil), each of which is normally written malum. The tree of the forbidden fruit is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in Genesis 2:17, and the Latin for “good and evil” is bonum et malum.
The apple is thought to have been domesticated 4,000–10,000 years ago in the Tian Shan mountains, and then to have traveled along the Silk Road to Europe, with hybridization and introgression of wild crabapples from Siberia (M. baccata), the Caucasus (M . orientalis), and Europe (M. sylvestris).
The proverb, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, addressing the supposed health benefits of the fruit, has been traced to 19th-century Wales, where the original phrase was “Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread”. In the 19th century and early 20th, the phrase evolved to “an apple a day, no doctor to pay” and “an apple a day sends the doctor away”; the phrasing now commonly used was first recorded in 1922.
However, today the apple is now present in all parts of the world and is no longer sacred or forbidden.
And friendly neighbors bring you a bag of apples from their orchard, organically grown and chemical-free.
Try baking apples. There are many variants. Baked just like that. Filled with various fillings.
Delicious baked apples, they are a wonderful dessert for colder evenings. They can also be eaten as a sweet dinner.
I prepared them stuffed with sugar and honey and stuffed with rosehip jam.
We need any number of apples, brown sugar, jam, honey, vanilla sugar, cinnamon.
Turn on the oven and set it to 170°C. Wash the apples, cut out the top with a knife, and cut out the stem. So that we get approx. 2 cm deep hole. Then, scrape out the seeds with a spoon. Make sure that the apple does not fall apart in your hand and that you do not puncture the lower part, or the bottom.
Place the apples on a baking tray. Fill half of the apples with brown sugar and half a teaspoon of honey. Fill the other half with your favorite jam. Finally, sprinkle with vanilla sugar and cinnamon.
Place the baking tray in the oven and bake the apples for 30-35 minutes at 170°C. I recommend that you check in between how well the apples are cooked and how they are being baked. If the skins of the apples crack during baking, it’s no big deal. When they are baked, transfer them to a plate and sprinkle with powdered sugar.
And last but not least, let your imagination run free.