Acres of apples

Apples are the quintessential American fruit; they speak of a time of homemade pleasures created from the fruit of the backyard tree: cider, apple butter, pies, dumplings.

Until the mid-1940s, nearly all of Southern California's apples actually came from a spot in our own collective backyard -- the foothill hamlet in eastern San Bernardino County known as Oak Glen. Oak Glen apples were even shipped around the world.

Today, apples from Washington and Oregon fill our supermarkets, but Oak Glen, near Yucaipa, has become a mecca for apple lovers because of the quality and amazing number of varieties of the fruit grown here -- most of which can't be found at farmers markets. About a dozen ranches raise about 100 varieties, including modern favorites such as Cameo and Pink Lady, a growing number of exotics such as Winter Banana and Sekai Ichi, and Oak Glen oldies such as Rome Beauty, Stayman Winesap, a unique pie apple known as Glen Seedling and the dramatically dark-skinned Arkansas Black.

Rare among specialty fruit-growing areas, Oak Glen never sells through farmers markets, where the few apples you see come from farther away, either the Central Coast or the Sierra foothills. Once in a while, Vons markets will feature some Oak Glen apples. But outside of that, you just have to go up to the Glen and buy directly from the growers.

There's more to the place than apples. Most orchards also make cider. Because apple varieties ripen at different times, this means the apples being used change throughout the season, so the cider from any orchard has a subtly different flavor from week to week. There's an art to blending the sweet and the tart, the mellow and the perfumed in a cider.

Nearly all Oak Glen cider is unpasteurized. If the bottle sits around for a couple of weeks, it will ferment, first becoming fizzy, then turning into hard cider. In the end, it will become apple cider vinegar -- with a far richer apple flavor than commercial cider vinegar. "A lot of people buy cider by the case just to let it turn into vinegar," says Alison Law-Mathisen of Mom's Country Orchard.

Many places sell apple butter, that nearly forgotten spread that's like a concentrate of applesauce. Apple jelly, apple syrup, apple sauce, even apple salsa show up on the shelves. And because Oak Glen farmers also raise cherries and raspberries, other preserves are available too.