Skip to content

POSTCARD MEMORIES: Peeling back the story of the apple harvest

Paring and coring enough apples for winter was difficult and time consuming

The time when ripening apples will appear on their trees is just around the corner. What better time to look back at the apple harvest of yore?

A century ago, most farms in Ontario – Bradford included - would have had an orchard of a dozen or more apple trees. The harvesting of their resulting bounty was a vital job that provided food stores for the coming winter.

Most settlers would have quickly established an apple orchard as soon as their land had been cleared. The reason is simple: apple trees provided a host of valuable food items.

In those days, relatively few apples were eaten fresh; that was a luxury farmers couldn’t afford. Instead, they pared and cored most of them for drying as a winter food store. Other apples were made into apple sauce or apple butter. If the farmer had an apple press, he might even leave aside some of the crop for apple cider. As a result, varieties that were hardy and stored well were preferred.

Paring and coring enough apples for winter was difficult and time consuming. To speed up the process, women and children gathered in the autumn for paring bees. Everyone competed good-naturedly to see who could peel the most apples or who could get the peel off in one single strand. A young woman who peeled an apple in a single piece would twirl the peel over her head and drop it on the floor. The letter that it resembled as it lay before her was said to be the initial of her future husband.

The process of peeling and coring was sped up significantly with the invention of the apple peeler, the first patent for which was said to be issued in 1803. Kitchen appliances were among the first mass-produced items of the industrial era.

The apple peeler most of us are familiar with are lathe-type peelers, in which the apple is skewered on prongs and spins as a stationary blade removes the peel and a corer removes the core. There were countless variations of the theme; between 1860 and 1890 over 100 apple parer/peeler patents were granted. Regardless of the form they took, every kitchen would have had one.

Those days are behind us now – supermarkets sell fresh apples year-round so there is no need for this tedious task.