Cameo Apples

Clean, bright and aromatic — sweet with a real tart edge behind it, and a distinct perfumed quality that the plant patent calls “a characteristic subacid, aromatic flavor”. People reach for pear, honey and citrus when describing it, and none of those is wrong.

It sits neatly between the two apples it grew up next to — sweeter than one, brighter than the other.

Sweet-leaning, with just enough sharpness to keep it lively. It reads sweeter than a RubyFrost and sits close to SnowSweet in the sweet half of the range.

What people notice is not the sweetness so much as the aroma. Cameo is one of the more perfumed apples in the orchard, and that carries the flavour further than the sugar alone would.

Yes — firm and dense rather than shatter-crisp. The patent describes the flesh as “white, firm, crisp, and juicy”, and it is solidly firm fruit.

The bite is closer to Fuji than to Honeycrisp: dense and fine-grained, breaking cleanly, rather than the coarse-celled explosion Honeycrisp is known for.

Distinctive, and the striping is the giveaway: red stripes over a greenish-yellow ground, rather than the solid blush most modern apples carry. The patent goes as far as naming the colours — a “Pale Green Yellow” background, stripes running from “Nopal Red” to “Ox Blood Red”, and pale “Sea Foam Yellow” lenticels dotted through them.

The shape is taller than it is wide — 3.75 inches long against 3.23 inches across — and the patent calls it “more roundish to conical” than Red Delicious, with the five bottom lobes much less pronounced.

No — the skin is notably thin, which is one of the variety’s quiet advantages. It is an apple you can eat whole without the skin announcing itself, unlike a RubyFrost or a Rome.

Thin skin has a cost in handling: Cameo bruises and scuffs more easily than a tough-skinned apple, so it wants gentler packing. That is part of why it is a better mail-order and farm-stand apple than a bulk-bin one.

They brown more slowly than most, though not dramatically so. For a cheese board or a lunchbox it holds up well for an hour or so; for a platter standing out all afternoon, treat it like any apple and toss the slices lightly in lemon or salted water.

If slow browning is the whole reason you are choosing an apple, the two to reach for here are SnowSweet, whose patent specifically calls the flesh “unusually resistant to oxidative browning”, and RubyFrost, which resists it through sheer acidity.

Because they are genuinely aromatic — the patent uses the word in its formal description of the flavour, which is not something most apple patents bother to do. Aroma compounds sit mostly in and just under the skin, and Cameo carries more of them than a typical modern supermarket apple.

Practically this means two things. Eat it with the skin on, where most of the aroma is. And store it away from strongly scented foods, because thin-skinned aromatic fruit both gives and takes smell more readily than a tough apple does.

Hard, and it stays that way.

More to the point, it holds that firmness for months. A Cameo in February is still a Cameo, where a softer autumn apple by then is mealy. That is the single practical reason to buy a case of them.

It is an old pomological term meaning mildly acidic — there is real acid present, but it sits under the sweetness rather than dominating it. It is the technical way of saying sweet-tart with the emphasis on sweet.

The patent’s full phrase is “a characteristic subacid, aromatic flavor”. Subacid is the old word for exactly this: sweet, with the brightness still in it.

It is one of our better answers to that, because the thing most modern apples lack is aroma and Cameo has it in unusual measure. Sweetness is everywhere in the produce aisle; perfume is not.

If someone has decided apples are bland, the two we reach for are Cameo for aroma and GoldRush for sheer intensity. Both taste of something specific rather than of generic sweetness.

Yes — the pale dots scattered across the skin are prominent on Cameo, and the patent even names their colour, “Sea Foam Yellow”. Against the red striping they are one of the easiest identification marks.

Lenticels are breathing pores. They are entirely normal, they are not blemishes, and a heavily lenticelled apple is not a defective one.

A little, and in the usual direction: fruit picked at the start of the 7–25 October window is slightly firmer and sharper, fruit at the end slightly sweeter and more aromatic.

Unlike GoldRush, which is genuinely unpleasant at harvest and needs months to come right, Cameo is good the day it is picked. Storage holds it rather than improving it.

Yes — “juicy” is in the patent’s own description of the flesh, alongside white, firm and crisp. It is not a dry apple at any point in its season.

The juice is part of why the thin skin works so well: there is nothing to chew through and plenty underneath. It is a cleaner eating experience than a thick-skinned apple of similar firmness.

Nobody knows. That is not evasion — it is what the plant patent says. USPP 9,068 describes Cameo as “discovered as a chance seedling of unknown parentage in the orchard of Darrel and Marilynn Caudle in Dryden, Wash.”

You will read almost everywhere that Cameo is a cross of Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. That is a guess, and the next question explains where it came from.

Probably not provable, and certainly not established. The claim rests on one circumstance: the seedling turned up in a block of Red Delicious trees with Golden Delicious pollenizers, so those were the two varieties standing nearest when it happened.

That is suggestive and it is not evidence. Orchards are full of pollen, bees travel a long way, and no DNA work has been published confirming either parent. An honest answer is that Cameo has one documented Red Delicious-shaped clue — the conical form the patent explicitly compares to Red Delicious — and an unknown pedigree. We would rather tell you that than repeat a tidy story.

Because a plausible guess is easier to publish than an admission of ignorance, and because each site copies the last. It has now been repeated so widely that Google’s own AI summary reports it, and an earlier version of this page said it too.

It is the same mistake we corrected on our Ambrosia page, where the patent’s careful phrase — that the fruit most closely resembles Jonagold — got retold across the internet as descent from Jonagold. Resemblance is not ancestry, and proximity is not parentage.

The cultivar name is ‘Caudle’, after Darrel and Marilynn Caudle, who found it and who are the named inventors on the patent. Cameo is the name it is sold under.

That split is normal for modern apples — Pink Lady® is ‘Cripps Pink’, SnowSweet® is ‘Wildung’, RubyFrost® is ‘New York 2’. The cultivar name is what a patent and a nursery use; the market name is what a shopper sees.

In an orchard at Dryden, Washington, a small community in the Wenatchee Valley, on land farmed by Darrel and Marilynn Caudle. The discovery is commonly dated to 1987; the patent application followed on 31 August 1993 and was granted on 7 March 1995.

It is a genuine chance seedling — a pip that sprouted where nobody planted it, grew into a tree, and turned out to be worth keeping. That still happens, and it is how McIntosh, Golden Delicious and Granny Smith all arrived too.

Patented as USPP 9,068, “Apple tree: Caudle cultivar”, filed 31 August 1993 and granted 7 March 1995. The patent expired in 2013 and was not renewed.

That matters if you want to grow one. Cameo is now in the public domain: any nursery may propagate it and anyone may plant it, with no licence, no royalty and no grower club. It is the opposite situation to RubyFrost, which no nursery will sell you at any price.

No. Cameo is a chance seedling — a naturally pollinated pip that grew where it fell in a Washington orchard — selected by two growers who noticed it and propagated by ordinary grafting ever since.

There is nothing engineered about it, and there is no engineered version of it. Every Cameo tree in the world is grafted wood tracing back to that one seedling at Dryden.

Not that has been published, as far as we can find — and that is precisely why the parentage question stays open. DNA fingerprinting has settled plenty of apple pedigrees, including Honeycrisp’s, where it overturned the parentage printed on the original patent.

Until someone does that work for Cameo, “unknown parentage” is the accurate answer, and the Red Delicious story remains an inference from which trees were standing nearby.

Not as far as anyone knows — but all three share the same origin story, which is why they keep coming up together on this site. Ambrosia, CandyCrisp and Cameo are all chance seedlings whose patents record the parentage as unknown or unrecorded.

All three have also had a tidy pedigree attached to them by other people: Ambrosia to Jonagold, CandyCrisp and Cameo to Red Delicious. In every case the patent says otherwise.

The cultivar name has always been ‘Caudle’, and that is what appears on the patent and on nursery tags. Cameo is the market name it has been sold under commercially.

If you see a nursery listing “Caudle” without the word Cameo, that is the same apple, not a different one.

Timing, mostly. Cameo reached the market in the mid-1990s, just before the club-variety era changed how apples are launched. Honeycrisp arrived with a university behind it, and everything after that came with a grower group, a marketing budget and controlled supply.

Cameo had two growers and a patent. It was planted widely in Washington on its merits, but it never had anyone spending money to make shoppers ask for it by name.

7 to 25 October is the window recorded in the plant patent. For context the same document puts Golden Delicious at 10–20 September and Red Delicious at 24 September to 4 October, so Cameo comes off two to four weeks after the apples it grew up among.

Weather and site shift that by a week either way. See Harvest Times for where this season actually stands.

Picked in October, and then available a long way into the year — Cameo is genuinely good from harvest through winter and often into spring, which is unusual and is the variety’s strongest practical virtue.

If nothing is listed above, the crop is still on the tree or the season has finished. Check Harvest Times, or see Ready to Ship for what is leaving the farm today.

Exceptionally well, and the patent is unusually emphatic about it: the “shelf life and keeping quality of the apple are exceptional and greatly exceed those of both Red Delicious and Golden Delicious apples”. In commercial storage that means months rather than weeks.

In an ordinary refrigerator, expect a Cameo to stay firm and enjoyable for a good deal longer than most apples of its season — comfortably into late winter if it went in sound. It is not a seven-month keeper like GoldRush, but it is far from a short one.

Refrigerate them, in a crisper drawer or a loosely closed perforated bag. Cold plus humidity is what buys you the long keeping the patent describes; a fruit bowl on the counter gets you about a week.

Two Cameo-specific notes. The skin is thin, so handle them gently and pull any bruised fruit out of the bag before it spoils its neighbours. And because the variety is strongly aromatic, keep it away from onions, garlic and anything else strongly scented — thin-skinned aromatic apples pick up smells.

No — wash them when you are about to eat them, not before. Surface moisture in storage encourages rot, and washing removes the natural bloom that helps the fruit hold its own moisture in.

Rinse under running water and rub with your hands just before eating or cooking, as with any fresh fruit.

Yes, for cooking. Peel, core and slice, freeze the slices in a single layer on a tray, then bag them once solid so they do not weld into a block. They will hold for months and go straight into pies, crisps and sauce.

What freezing will not preserve is the fresh-eating texture — ice crystals rupture the cells and thawed slices come back soft. Freeze Cameo for the oven, not for the lunchbox. Given how long the fruit keeps fresh in a refrigerator, most people never need to.

Not in the way GoldRush does, which is harshly tart at harvest and only comes into balance after months. Cameo is already balanced when it is picked.

What it does is hold, which for an eating apple is the more useful trick. Expect the same clean sweet-tart aromatic apple in February that you had in October, where most varieties would have gone soft or flat by then.

Yes, if it genuinely stays cold and does not freeze — an unheated garage, a root cellar or a cold basement all work, and that is closer to the “common storage” conditions the patent describes than a kitchen is.

Two cautions. Apples freeze at about 28°F and the flesh turns to mush on thawing, so a hard-freezing garage will ruin them. And a garage full of petrol, paint or onions will flavour thin-skinned aromatic fruit — Cameo is unusually vulnerable to that.

A perforated or loosely closed bag, yes. Apples need humidity to stay crisp, and a bag holds it; they also give off ethylene, which a sealed bag traps and which speeds ripening. Perforations give you the humidity without the build-up.

A supermarket produce bag with a few holes punched in it, left open at the top in the crisper drawer, is genuinely as good as anything you can buy.

Because apples are strong ethylene producers, and ethylene is the gas that tells fruit and vegetables to ripen. Stored next to apples, bananas darken, avocados soften and leafy greens and broccoli yellow noticeably faster.

It runs the other way too. Bananas and tomatoes produce plenty of ethylene themselves, so keeping them beside your Cameos shortens the apples’ life. Separate drawers solve it.

Press it gently at the shoulder, near the stem. That is where an apple softens first. If it gives under light pressure, or if the skin has gone slightly dull and slack instead of taut, the texture is going.

A Cameo past its best is still fine for sauce or baking — cook it rather than bin it. What you lose first is the crispness, not the flavour.

Not in the way a pear or a banana does. Apples are picked mature and do not sweeten meaningfully off the tree; what happens after picking is slow softening, which is deterioration rather than ripening.

That is why picking date matters so much. A Cameo taken before the 7–25 October window will always be a slightly under-flavoured Cameo, and no amount of sitting on a counter will fix it.

Fresh eating first — snacking, salads, cheese boards, lunchboxes. The combination of dense crisp flesh, thin skin and strong aroma is built for eating raw, and that is where the variety is at its best.

It is also a capable all-rounder in the kitchen: sauce, crisps, sauteed apples and cider blends all work. Pie is the one place it needs help, for the reason in the next answer.

Yes, with one caveat. The flesh is firm and dense enough to hold its shape through heat, which is half of what a baking apple needs, and the aroma survives the oven better than most.

The caveat is acid. At 0.400 Cameo carries less than Golden Delicious and a lot less than a proper baking apple, so a Cameo-only dessert can taste sweet and slightly flat. Squeeze in lemon, or blend.

Good in a pie, rarely great alone. The slices hold beautifully — you will get recognisable pieces of apple, not sauce — but a single-variety Cameo pie usually wants more tartness than the apple brings.

Our recommendation is two-thirds Cameo for structure and aroma, one-third something sharp: Northern Spy, RubyFrost, GoldRush or Granny Smith. For a single-variety pie, use Northern Spy.

Very good. The flesh breaks down smoothly and the natural sweetness means most batches need no added sugar at all — and the aroma carries through cooking, which is genuinely uncommon.

Cook it skin-on and sieve for colour and a little extra body. Finish with lemon, because the apple will not supply much brightness on its own.

One of the best on the farm for it. Thin skin means you need not peel, dense flesh means the slices stay slices, and the perfumed sweet-tart flavour stands up to a sharp dressing instead of disappearing into it.

It is excellent with blue cheese and walnuts, in a shaved fennel salad, or in a slaw. Slice it close to serving, or give it a light toss in the dressing to hold the colour.

As part of a blend, yes — and the aroma is what it contributes. For sweet cider it presses a fragrant, well-balanced juice that is pleasant on its own and better still cut with something sharper.

Blend it with GoldRush, a russet, or a crab for structure.

Yes, and it is an underrated use. Cut thick wedges, leave the skin on, and the dense flesh holds together over heat instead of collapsing — while the sugars caramelise and the aroma concentrates.

Grilled wedges are good with vanilla ice cream, and roasted alongside pork or chicken they work as a savoury side. Thicker cuts preserve more texture.

Yes, and the aroma is the reason to. Slice an eighth of an inch thick and dry at 135°F for six to ten hours until leathery rather than brittle. The perfume concentrates as the water leaves.

Because Cameo browns relatively slowly you can often skip the lemon pre-treatment, though a brief dip will keep the rings paler if appearance matters.

Yes, and it is a good choice — the aroma is the reason. Apple butter is hours of slow reduction, which flattens most varieties into generic sweetness; Cameo’s perfume survives that better than most.

Add lemon or cider vinegar. There is not quite enough brightness to carry a long cook on its own, and without it the butter tastes like sweetened puree.

Yes, and better here than in a pie. A crisp is more forgiving about acidity because the oat-and-butter topping supplies its own richness and contrast, and Cameo’s firm slices hold up under it.

Still squeeze in some lemon. And allow a little extra time — a dense apple does not soften on the same schedule as a McIntosh.

Very well. Thick skin-on wedges roasted alongside pork, chicken or sausages hold their shape and pick up the pan juices, and the aroma reads as a deliberate flavour rather than as sweetness.

It also works grated raw into a slaw with mustard and cider vinegar, or sliced onto a sandwich with sharp cheese and ham.

Rarely. The skin is thin enough to disappear in a crisp, a cake or a roasted wedge, and leaving it on keeps more of the aroma and gives sauce a faint pink tint.

Peel it for a smooth-textured pie filling or a pale sauce, and leave it on for everything else.

Six or seven for a nine-inch pie. Cameo runs medium to large and is taller than it is wide, so it weighs a little more than its width suggests — two large or three medium to the pound.

Remember our standing advice with this variety: use about two-thirds Cameo and one-third something sharp. A single-variety Cameo pie holds its shape beautifully and tastes flat.

Reasonably, though it is not the classic choice. The thin skin takes caramel well and the flesh is firm enough to stay crisp under it.

The issue is contrast: a caramel apple works best when the fruit fights back, which is why Granny Smith is traditional. Cameo is on the sweet side of ideal — good, but not the sharpest tool for that job.

Yes — and pre-made filling is a better use of the freezer than plain slices. Cook the filling with its sugar, spice and lemon, cool it, and freeze it in a pie-sized portion.

Because the flesh is dense, Cameo comes out of that process with more structure than a soft apple would. Add the lemon at the filling stage, not after.

A medium Cameo — about 205 grams — is roughly 100 to 115 calories. A small one is nearer 80 to 90; a large one runs 125 to 140.

The figure to work from is 52 calories per 100 grams, from USDA, for a raw apple with the skin on. Cameo is a good-sized apple and eats sweet-tart, so it feels like more of a snack than the numbers suggest.

A large Cameo of about 255 grams comes to roughly 125 to 140 calories.

Across the sizes we pack: small (~165 g) about 86, medium (~205 g) about 107, large (~255 g) about 133. Multiply the weight in grams by 0.52 for a close estimate at any size.

A small Cameo of about 165 grams is roughly 80 to 90 calories.

A kitchen scale beats guessing from the word on the bag — and the apple count on a case is the quickest guide, since a 72-count fruit is considerably larger than a 125-count.

Per 100 grams of raw Cameo with the skin on: about 52 calories, 13.81 g carbohydrate, 2.4 g fiber, 0.26 g protein, 0.17 g fat, 107 mg potassium and 85.56 g water.

For a medium apple of about 205 grams that is roughly 107 calories, 28 g carbohydrate and 4.9 g fiber. The full table by size is in the nutrition section above.

About 26 to 30 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, of which roughly 4.9 grams is fiber — so approximately 23 grams of net carbs.

Per 100 grams that is 13.81 grams. That is typical for an apple.

Roughly 28 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, with about 4.9 grams of that being dietary fiber.

Essentially all of an apple’s calories are carbohydrate — there is almost no fat and, in this cultivar, about 0.26 grams of protein per 100 grams.

About 19 to 23 grams in a medium apple, all of it the fruit’s own — nothing is added. That is 10.4 grams per 100 grams of fruit.

Cameo is a balanced apple — sweet up front, aromatic, with a gentle tartness that keeps it lively. It eats sweeter than Granny Smith and brighter than Red Delicious.

About 4.9 grams in a medium apple with the skin on — 2.4 grams per 100 grams.

That is about average for an apple. Peeling costs you roughly a third of it.

Very little of either: about 0.5 grams of protein and 0.3 grams of fat in a medium apple, and virtually no sodium.

Apples are almost entirely water and carbohydrate — Cameo is about 85.56 percent water by weight.

About 107 mg per 100 grams, so roughly 219 mg in a medium apple.

That is typical for an apple.

About 9.4 mg in a medium apple — 4.6 mg per 100 grams.

Apples are not a major vitamin C source next to citrus; an orange carries roughly ten times as much. What there is sits mostly just under the skin and degrades with heat, so a raw unpeeled apple retains more of it than a baked one.

For fiber, yes — roughly a third of it sits in the skin, along with most of the fruit’s colour compounds.

Cameo skin is notably thin — one of the variety’s real advantages, and most of its aroma sits there. Leave it on for eating and for sauce; it also means the fruit scuffs more easily and wants gentler handling. Rinse under running water and rub with your hands before eating, as with any fresh fruit.

Roughly two large, three medium or four small apples make a pound — three medium is the standard working assumption in American recipes.

Cameo runs medium to large and is taller than it is wide, so expect two large or three medium to the pound. A 9-inch pie takes six or seven.

Texture and aroma, mostly. Honeycrisp is about the crunch: coarse-celled, explosively juicy, bred for that sensation above all. Cameo is denser and finer-grained, less dramatic in the mouth, and considerably more perfumed — there is an aromatic quality Honeycrisp simply does not have.

Two practical differences. Cameo is picked later, in October rather than late September. And Cameo has a much thinner skin, which some people strongly prefer. If you want the crunch, Honeycrisp. If you want aroma and a thin skin, Cameo — and it will usually cost less.

Fuji, clearly and by some distance. Fuji is one of the sweetest apples grown, and Cameo carries noticeably more acid, so the two do not really compete on sweetness.

They are closer on texture — both dense, firm and fine-grained rather than coarse. Choose Fuji for straightforward sweetness and Cameo when you want the sweet-tart balance and the aroma. Both keep unusually well.

They share a shape and very little else. The patent compares the two directly: Cameo is “more roundish to conical” with less prominent bottom lobes, and it is striped rather than solid-coloured.

On eating they are not close. Red Delicious is famously low in acid — 0.270 in the patent’s own measurement — with a thick skin and a mild flavour. Cameo is brighter, thin-skinned and genuinely aromatic. Anyone who gave up on apples because of a mealy Red Delicious should try a Cameo.

They have more in common than either has with most apples: both are chance seedlings of genuinely unknown parentage, both are aromatic, both are sweet-leaning with moderate acid, and both had a tidy but unproven pedigree attached to them by other people.

The differences are that Ambrosia is sweeter and more honeyed with lower acid, while Cameo is brighter and more perfumed, with a firmer, denser bite and better keeping.

Gala is milder, softer and sweeter, and it is the safer choice for a child or anyone who dislikes tartness. Cameo is firmer, brighter and much more aromatic.

Keeping is the bigger practical gap: Cameo holds its texture far longer. If you are buying a case to eat over two months rather than two weeks, Cameo is the better bet.

Both are late, firm, aromatic, long-keeping, sweet-tart apples, so anyone who likes one usually likes the other. Pink Lady is sharper — a distinctive fizzy acidity — and has a denser, harder bite.

Cameo is the gentler of the two: less acid, more floral aroma, thinner skin. Pink Lady if you want the sharpness; Cameo if you want the perfume.

Mostly yes. It sits well below Granny Smith or RubyFrost territory, and the aroma reads as sweetness to most palates.

If someone wants no tartness at all, Fuji, Gala or Golden Delicious are the safer picks. Cameo does have a genuine tart edge — it is just well covered.

CandyCrisp, by a wide and measured margin.

They are aiming at different people. CandyCrisp is for someone who wants sugar and nothing in the way of it. Cameo is for someone who wants balance and aroma. Both are chance seedlings of unknown parentage, which is the one thing they genuinely share.

Close on sweetness, far apart on everything else. The ratios are nearly identical — about 29 and 30 to one.

The differences are aroma and keeping. Cameo is markedly more perfumed and stores for months; SnowSweet is richer and more buttery but is a 60-to-80-day apple. SnowSweet also resists browning, which Cameo only does moderately.

Jonagold, comfortably. It carries more acid and more complexity, and it is one of the better all-purpose baking apples we grow.

Cameo’s advantage over Jonagold is keeping: Jonagold softens relatively quickly, while Cameo holds its texture for months. For a February pie, the Cameo will be the one still worth using.

They occupy similar ground — both firm, both aromatic, both late, both good keepers with a real sweet-tart balance. Anyone who likes Braeburn will get on with Cameo.

Braeburn is the sharper and spicier of the two; Cameo is softer in flavour, more floral, and has the thinner skin. We do not grow Braeburn, but its offspring RubyFrost is on this farm and inherited the sharpness.

RubyFrost is the closest step up in sharpness while keeping the firmness and the juice. Northern Spy if you want complexity with the tartness.

If you want to go all the way, GoldRush is the sharpest thing we grow, and Granny Smith is the familiar benchmark.

Different, and cheaper. Honeycrisp wins decisively on texture — nothing else gives you that coarse-celled explosion. Cameo wins on aroma, on skin thinness, and usually on price.

The honest framing is that Honeycrisp is a texture apple and Cameo is a flavour apple. If you have never tried Cameo, order a few alongside whatever you usually buy and judge it that way.

The variety is naturally on the large side. The patent describes the tree as “vigorous and tall, with a spreading, open growth form”, and records the original seedling at about 11 feet wide and 14 feet tall at ten years, putting on 14 to 20 inches of terminal growth a year.

Final size is set by rootstock, not the variety: 20 to 25 feet on a standard, 12 to 15 on semi-dwarf, 8 to 10 on a dwarfing stock such as M.9 or a Geneva series. Given Cameo’s natural vigour, most home growers should choose a dwarfing rootstock and expect to prune.

Yes — and unusually for a modern named apple, freely. The plant patent expired in 2013 and was not renewed, so Cameo is in the public domain: any nursery may propagate it, with no club, no licence and no royalty.

Several mail-order nurseries carry it. Honeycrisp.com is an orchard rather than a nursery, so we ship the fruit and not the trees; if you are here for apples to eat, see Ready to Ship.

Yes. Like nearly every apple it is not self-fertile and needs pollen from a different variety flowering at the same time. The patent puts Cameo’s bloom with Golden Delicious and one day after Red Delicious, which is squarely mid-season.

Good partners include Golden Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Honeycrisp, Empire or a flowering crabapple. Avoid relying on a triploid such as Mutsu or Jonagold — they make poor pollen and cannot fertilise anything.

Large and showy — the patent says so in as many words. The buds are pink on the outside of the petals and open to a mostly white flower, which makes a Cameo in full bloom a genuinely ornamental tree.

Bloom timing matches Golden Delicious and runs one day behind Red Delicious, so anything in the broad mid-season group will overlap with it.

It came out of the Wenatchee Valley in Washington — a dry, sunny, continental fruit district with cold winters — and it does best in that sort of climate. Nurseries generally list it for roughly USDA zones 5 to 8.

Like all apples it needs winter chill to fruit properly, and like most striped varieties it colours best where nights turn cold before harvest. It colours best where the nights turn cold before harvest.

Typically four to six years on a standard or semi-dwarf rootstock, and as little as two to three on a dwarfing one. Rootstock matters far more than variety for how soon you get apples.

Cameo is a vigorous tree, and vigour tends to delay fruiting a little — the tree puts its energy into wood first. Summer pruning and limb-spreading both help bring it into bearing.

Late winter, while the tree is dormant and before the buds break — that is standard for apples and Cameo is no exception. Summer pruning can be used to check growth on a vigorous tree.

Cameo needs it more than most. The patent describes a “vigorous and tall” tree with a “spreading, open growth form” putting on 14 to 20 inches a year; left alone for a few seasons it gets away from you.

The patent makes no biennial-bearing claim either way, so the honest answer is that it is not documented. In practice Cameo is generally reported as a reliable annual cropper rather than a strongly biennial one.

Thinning a heavy crop is the best insurance regardless of variety. A tree allowed to overcrop in one year almost always underperforms the next, whatever its natural tendency.

Four to six years on a standard or semi-dwarf rootstock, and two to three on a dwarfing one. Rootstock governs this far more than variety does.

Cameo’s natural vigour works slightly against early fruiting — a vigorous tree puts its energy into wood first. Limb-spreading and summer pruning both help bring it into bearing sooner.

They stripe rather than blush, and the striping develops best where nights turn cold before harvest. In a warm autumn the stripes are paler and the greenish-yellow ground shows more.

Colour is cosmetic here rather than an indicator of ripeness. A paler-striped Cameo picked at the right time eats exactly the same as a deeply striped one.

Here, in season, shipped from the farm — and otherwise at orchards and better produce departments from autumn into spring. Cameo had a strong run in Washington commercial plantings and remains reasonably findable, though it has never had the shelf presence of Gala or Fuji.

If nothing is listed above, the crop is still on the tree or the season has ended. Check Harvest Times, or see Ready to Ship for what is leaving the farm today.

We ship fresh apples across the country, with some destination restrictions and some weather-driven seasonal limits — hard freezes and extreme heat both affect what we will send and when. Our shipping information page covers packing, timing and destinations.

Cameo travels well for a thin-skinned apple because the flesh is dense, but it wants careful packing. For a specific state or delivery date, call 518-695-4517 or email [email protected].

Look for firm fruit with clear, bright striping over a greenish-yellow ground, and smooth unblemished skin. A Cameo that has gone dull or slightly wrinkled at the shoulders has been out of cold storage too long.

Because the skin is thin, check for scuffs and pressure marks rather than only for bruises. Get them into the refrigerator promptly.

Cases are sold by apple count rather than by piece count, because a case is a fixed weight. A 72-count case holds 72 larger apples; a 125-count case holds 125 smaller ones.

Cameo typically packs in the middle to larger counts. Our general apple FAQ explains apple-count sizing across every variety we grow.

Because it sits awkwardly in the modern produce aisle. Cameo is striped rather than solid red at a moment when buyers shop on uniform colour; it is thin-skinned, so it needs gentler handling than a bulk bin gives it; and it arrived just as the club varieties were absorbing the marketing money.

None of that is about how it eats. It is a genuinely good, long-keeping, aromatic apple that lost a shelf-space argument, which is why it turns up more reliably at orchards and farm shops than at chain grocers.

No — Cameo is one of the better-value apples we sell. The patent expired in 2013, so there is no licence fee or royalty in the price, unlike a club variety such as RubyFrost or SnapDragon.

What you are paying for is careful handling of a thin-skinned apple and the cold storage that makes its long season possible. For an aromatic apple that stays crisp into late winter, it is good value.

Call 518-695-4517 or email [email protected]. We are an orchard, so the person who answers has handled the fruit.

Our general apple FAQ covers washing, handling, storage and apple-count sizing across every variety we grow, and shipping information covers packing and delivery.

It depends on the season and the grade, which is why we sell by apple count rather than by a size word. A case is a fixed weight, so a 72-count case holds 72 larger apples and a 125-count holds 125 smaller ones.

Cameo typically packs in the middle to larger counts. If you need a particular size — for a gift box, or for lunchboxes — call 518-695-4517 and we will tell you what this week’s fruit is running.

Yes, and it makes a better gift than a familiar variety precisely because most people have never eaten one. A striped, strongly aromatic apple with a thin skin is a genuine discovery for someone who buys Gala every week.

We pack gift boxes and can include a note. Call 518-695-4517 or email [email protected] and we will tell you what is ready.

Yes — cases and bulk quantities are available in season, and Cameo is one of the better varieties to buy that way because it keeps for months rather than weeks. A case bought in November is still good eating well into the new year.

See bulk and case apples, or call 518-695-4517 to talk through quantities and timing.

Carefully, and more carefully than a tough-skinned variety needs. Cameo has thin skin, so it scuffs and marks more readily — it is packed to keep the fruit from moving in transit rather than simply filled to the top.

Our shipping information page covers packing, timing and destinations. Weather matters too: hard freezes and extreme heat both affect what we will send and when.

Call us on 518-695-4517 or email [email protected], and tell us what arrived. We would rather know.

In the meantime, bruised fruit is not wasted fruit — cut out the mark and use the rest for sauce, a crisp or apple butter. What you should not do is leave a bruised apple in the bag with the sound ones.

From the October picking straight through winter. Unlike a variety that peaks in a three-week window, Cameo’s whole point is that it holds — the patent calls its keeping quality “exceptional” and says it “greatly exceeds” both Delicious varieties.

If you want it at its most aromatic, order early in the season. If you want the best apple in the house in February, order a case and refrigerate it.