‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ is more than just a rhyme

Christine Manby explores the many health benefits of this low-carbon, highly versatile fruit – but it’s probably better eaten without cookies

Illustration by Tom Ford

When I was a child, we lived in a modern house that had been built on land that had once been part of an orchard. Two of the orchard’s trees remained in the garden. They were an apple tree and a Victoria plum. Dad subsequently planted a pear tree and a cooking apple. They were beautiful trees and always generous as the summer turned into early autumn. I loved to eat sweet, dark-purple fruit straight from the branches of the Victoria plum, though the wasps that liked the fruit as much as I did were a menace.

The apples offered – to my mind – less glamorous bounty but there were years when the old apple tree yielded what seemed like a thousand fruit. Dad would climb up the ladder and pass them down to us. We’d fill boxes and boxes. We children could help ourselves to as many as we liked. But unlike the plums, I never wanted more than a single apple at a sitting. Once the fruit bowl in the kitchen was full and bulging bags had been given away to the neighbours, there were still hundreds left over. But they were never discarded. Those were the apples to be wrapped for the winter.

Wrapping apples was not a job that could be rushed. Each apple had to have its own individual newspaper coat, lest one of them decide to turn bad and spread its rotten influence while we weren’t looking. Once the apples were wrapped, they were put to bed in layers in boxes that went up into the chilly loft, from whence they would be retrieved, a dozen at a time, over the winter.