Excellent fresh eating, great sauce and sharp cider apple. Alas, however, not a pie apple—turns to soup. Famous in Maine for well over 200 years. The 1865 Department of Agriculture yearbook sums it up: “Flesh remarkably white, tender, juicy…deliciously pleasant, with a slight perfume… No orchard in the north can be counted as complete without this variety… It is just so good that everybody likes to eat of it; and when cooked, it is white, puffy, and delicious.”

Medium-small roundish ruby-red thin-skinned fruit. Keeps until late December. As one of the few apples that comes relatively true-to-type from seed, occasional “variations on a Fameuse theme” can be found in old orchards.

Recent discoveries suggest that it could be one of the oldest varieties in North America. (For more details, you’ll have to read John’s recent book Apples and the Art of Detection.) Thought to be a parent of McIntosh.

Productive long-lived tree. Susceptible to scab. Blooms mid-late. Z3. Maine Grown. (Standard: 3–6' bare-root trees)