The Development of Empire Apples

Posted on by M.E. Bond Posted in Origins, UncategorizedTagged , ,

I was recently intrigued to discover an apple ranking website but disenchanted to see that the creator ranks Empire below Gala because I much prefer the flavour of Empire apples! Regardless, I was inspired to look up the origin of Empires. Here’s what I learned from a couple of websites (not Wikipedia).

  • In 1945 at his Hudson Valley orchard Lester C. Anderson, a Cornell University fruit nutritionist, crossed Red Delicious and McIntosh apples “through a series of open-pollinated experiments.”
  • Then Geneva Experiement Station breeders collected twenty bushels of apples from Anderson’s orchard and planted the seeds.
  • The seedlings of the McIntosh-Red Delicious cross were labeled as a variation of NY 45500
  • After two decades of the seedlings being “continuously studied, sorted, and culled,” Dr. Roger Way, who had a doctorate in pomology and had joined the Geneva team in 1949, selected seedling NY 45500-5 for commercial cultivation.
  • It was Dr. Way who named the cultivar Empire and officially introduced it at the New York State Fruit Testing Association Meeting on September 15, 1966.
  • (Between development and commercial introduction, new varieties must be evaluated for flavour, growing tendencies, resistance to pests and disease, yield and consistency, and storage qualities.)
  • By 1974 Empire apples were deemed “commercially significant” by the United States Department of Agriculture.
  • In 1987 Empires received an Outstanding Fruit Cultivar award from the American Society for Horticultural Science.
  • “Dr. Way and Empire apples were even featured on the primetime TV show Jeopardy. The trivia question stated, ‘Roger Way tasted 200 of these a day, helping him develop the Empire and Jonagold types.’ The correct answer was, ‘What are apples.'”
  • Today Empires are grown in the UK and Canada, as well as the U.S., where they are among the top ten commercially grown varieties and account for nearly half the apples exported from New York state.

Sources

(If you love apples you might be interested in AppleRankings.com, but use at your own risk. I’m not even going to tell you what it said about another nostalgic favourite of mine, the russet.)

Leave a Reply