Apples

There is no more varied, more widely enjoyed, more mythical a fruit than the apple. Whether chopped, cooked, crushed, distilled or simply bitten into, the apple dominates temperate countries from Japan to the American Northwest. At its most banal the apple is Nature's ultimate snack-food. At its most exalted it is the cause of mankind's fall. Frank Browning grew up among orchards and still works an Appalachian apple farm. Apples is a marvellous meditation born of a lifelong fascination with the world's most popular fruit. In this story of the fruit of temptation, taking us from the Heavenly Mountains of Kazakhstan to the apple germ-plasm repository in New York, Browning celebrates the unstoppable spread of apples around the world, their astounding diversity, their myriad uses, their mythology and their future. Both practical and tantalising, Apples concludes with a selection of remarkable recipes from around the world.