Thanks to Aaron Kagan for this guest post. Aaron is a freelance writer in the Boston area and maintains the blog Tea and Food.

The apple might seem too obvious a choice for a Rosh Hashanah post, but how much do you really know about this omnipresent fruit? For starters, why do we eat it on Rosh Hashanah?

True, apples are eaten with honey to ensure a sweet year, but more importantly they are eaten for the simple reason that they are in season this time of year in places that Jews have historically lived. Why we ate it growing up in Boca Raton is partly for tradition and partly because of the strange, industrialized relationship we have to seasonality. Thanks, California.

Another basic but commonly unknown fact about the apple is where it comes from. In other words, where did we Jews first encounter apples? Like people, all evidence points towards the apple making its first appearance in the Fertile Crescent, with the earliest evidence of cultivation occurring in what is now southern Russia. From there the fruit eventually spread in both directions, across Europe and Asia and ultimately to every continent besides Antarctica.

Later, a man by the name of John Chapman from Leominster, Massachusetts earned the nickname “Johnny Appleseed” for his help building the apple industry of the East Coast and Midwestern United States. Yes, he did actually exist, but no, he was not solely responsible for spreading the fruit around the country, nor did he do so by tossing seeds from a burlap sack. An aficionado like Chapman would have known that apples are not “true to seed” and are better spread by grafting scions onto rootstock. The apples in the photo above fell from the tree in my yard, a mere twenty-one miles from Chapman’s birthplace.

Besides being dipped in honey, apples have countless uses and are eaten raw, baked, dried, covered in nearly impenetrable shells of caramel, pressed into cider, fermented into vinegar, distilled into brandy, cooked down into “butter,” baked in quick breads, pastries and pies, and prepared in pretty much any other way you can cook any other thing you can think of.

The apple is also a member of the rose family, and is the mostly widely cultivated fruit on the planet with China growing over five million more apples than the U.S. Still, the phrase “as Chinese as apple pie” doesn’t quite have the same ring.

One mystery of the apple remains. If Jewish food traditions are dictated by seasonality, which they are, why is it that we eat apples for Rosh Hashanah, when they’re in season, and then again in the Spring for Pesach, when they aren’t?

Spontaneously Fermented Hard Cider
Unpasteurized apple cider (pasteurized without preservatives will work too, just not as well)

Press or purchase your cider, pour into a glass bottle and cover the neck of the vessel with cloth. Let sit until the cider reaches the desired dryness and alcohol content, roughly two to three weeks. Enjoy or bottle, though if you do, keep it refrigerated or it might just explode. Drink. Have a sweet year.