The Simple Pleasures of Conserving Fruits for Winter

To everything a season, turn, turn, turn…Well, those of you of my generation, anyway, will recognize that classic Byrds tune. But even if you’re too young to remember the Byrds, you can still rediscover the pleasures that come from not having everything all the time. Gardening is perhaps the ultimate exercise in learning to appreciate the seasons, and what each has to offer. Even if you don’t garden, you surely notice that sweet corn being flown in from some distant corner of the world in the middle of winter isn’t even a pale shadow of the succulent ears available at your local farmer’s market in late summer.

But even for accomplished gardeners, “putting by” fruit for winter enjoyment is a practice most of us neglect in favour of the convenience of the year-round Red Delicious apples at the local supermarket. Yet, here in France, the careful conservation of apples and pears and even table grapes for the winter months is still engaged in to a surprising degree. Even at the commercial level, we are lucky here to be able to purchase, for instance, the ancient winter pear variety ‘Passe Crassane’ for a brief period in midwinter each year. This pear, which must be carefully ripened post-harvest for 6 weeks to 2 months to be at the peak of its perfection, is quite definitely the ultimate pear experience—richly aromatic, sweet but with a tantalizing acid undertone, juicy, and buttery smooth. This old-time delicacy, in limited production, is only in the best produce stores for about 3 weeks, when it is quickly snatched up by pear afficinadios who wait all year for its brief appearance. You can recognize ‘Passe Crassane’ by its squatty shape, copper-russeted skin, and always, by the blob of red-and-yellow sealing wax applied to the end of its stem.



The wax is not there for decoration or brand recognition. It is part of the caring ancient art of putting fruit by for winter. The ‘Passe Crassane,’ like many of the “winter” pears, does not ripen on the tree, however long you may let it hang. It ripens over a prolonged period of winter storage, slowly developing its heady pear perfume, and transforming its flesh from hard and grainy to silkily ripe and slippery with juice. The problem is, how do you prevent the pear from dehydrating before it ripens fully? Answer: seal the end of its stem with a blob of sealing wax. This prevents the loss of moisture, which in the pear occurs primarily through its thick stem.



I am forced to pause here and mention that I love living in a country where people take the time and care enough about the quality of their food to seal their prize pears’ stems with sealing wax, even on a commercial scale!

This is a trick you can easily practice at home, given of course that you have planted a tree of lovely winter pears, such as the ‘Passe Crassane,’ ‘Conference,’ or even the humble ‘Winter Nelis.’ Harvest the pears as late as you dare, but before hard frost. Handle them with great care, as any fruit intended for storage must not suffer the slightest bruise. Applying wax to the pears obviously makes a great project in which to involve your children. Use simple sealing wax available at good stationery stores. Melt the wax in a heatproof, shallow container in a hot water bath, or even at a low microwave setting, then simply dip the end of each pear’s stem, scooping up a nice little blob, and let it harden.

As you may already know, it is the ethylene produced by ripening fruit that causes it to ripen further. Ethylene also causes potatoes to sprout more rapidly, which is why one is always advised not to store apples and potatoes in the same cellar. While the ripening of winter pears in storage is a desirable thing, the progressive ripening of apples means that they pass from optimal sugar/acid balance and crisp flesh to flavours that are overly sweet, eventually winey, while the texture of their flesh becomes soft or mealy. With both pears and apples, the eventual outcome of continuous ripening is rotting.



Combating the effects of too much ethylene is one of the most important strategies of long term winter fruit storage. As ethylene production increases as the ambient temperature rises, it is important to store fruit in a very cool location, such as a cellar or lacking that, an unheated room or garage where, however, the temperatures will not drop below around 30 degrees F. Second, good ventilation to get rid of the ethylene build-up is important. This explains why extra refrigerators do not make very satisfactory fruit storage units (in addition to the fact that refrigerated fruit inevitably acquires a “refrigerator” off-taste). It also explains fruit is sold in plastic bags that are liberally perforated. Finally, high humidity is a plus for long term fruit storage. Therefore, a damp, cold basement or cellar is ideal.

Once you have chosen the place to store your fruit, you must decide on a storage structure. The best method of storing apples and pears for the winter, in use since antiquity in France, is what is here called the cageot à fruits. The cageot is a shallow wooden (or sometimes basketry) crate that accommodates the fruit in a single layer. The cageots are slatted—that is, they allow air to circulate freely—and they have short feet that allow them to be stacked one on top of the other, while leaving an air space between adjacent crates. Within the cageot, each fruit is wrapped in tissue paper, again to keep the fruits from touching each other and allow air to freely circulate around them. This makes for a convenient modular system for storing your fruit, allowing you to easily organize varieties and move them around. The same system, incidentally, works famously for storing winter squashes.

These simple yet ingenious cageots are still available in some French country hardware stores and farm stores. But I imagine that if you are even mildly handy, you could easily build your own using, say, discarded wooden pallets and cutting them up to suit your purposes.

Of course, not all fruit varieties are created equal when it comes to their suitability for storage. Unfortunately, many of the best suited varieties have fallen by the wayside in wider commerce, as people have lost interest in the forgotten art of storing their own fruit. However, there are plenty of specialty nurseries still offering them, and usually an internet search will turn them up. Obviously, very late-maturing fruit varieties are the best for winter storage. Varieties with very thick skin also tend to store better. At the end of the article are two short lists of the best varieties to last you until early spring. You will notice that just about all of them are historic or “antique” varieties dating from the time when people counted on winter stored fruit as a cold-season treat. However, what you can’t tell from looking at these lists is the bouquet of extraordinary flavours that awaits you in these old-time varieties, bred for taste and not for uniformity or other commercial qualities. You’ll never want to settle for store-bought apples again.



Fruit that is to be stored must be impeccable condition. Forget windfall apples for storage and rather use them immediately. Your storage fruit needs to be hand-picked and handled gently, as the slightest bruise will spread and develop into spoilage.

Many unanticipated and pleasant surprises await you when you grow your own fruit for winter storage. You’ll notice that the flavour of any given variety will change over the storage period, often for the better. And you’ll learn, as I did, that the very finest apple tarts are made from shrivelled apples at the end of the winter. Their flavour is more concentrated and their lower water content makes for a particularly perfect tart that can’t be duplicated at any other time of the year. And perhaps you’ll enjoy a small Luddite thrill when at the supermarket you bypass the wan winter raspberries and apples redolent only of their CO2 storage for your very own, seasonal, not-to-be-had-anywhere-else delights.



Apple varieties for winter storage:

‘Calville Blanc d’Hiver’
‘Roxbury Russet’
‘Lady’
‘Newtown Pippin’
‘Arkansas Black’
‘Ashmead’s Kernel’
‘Belle de Boskoop’
‘Claygate Pearmain’
‘Court Pendu Plat’
‘Edward VII’
‘White Winter Pearmain’
‘Esopus Spitzenburg’
‘Orange de Somerville’

Pear varieties for winter storage:

‘Passe Crassane’
‘Conference’
‘Winter Nelis’ (sometimes referred to as ‘Winter Nelly’)
‘Comice’
‘Anjou’

For an excellent selection of heirloom fruits, Southmeadow Fruit Gardens, at http://www.southmeadowfruitgardens.com.

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