Pound Sweet Apples

Sweet, and then sweet again. This is one of the sweetest apples in American pomology and it is very low in acid — the historical descriptions do not bother with adjectives beyond “very sweet”, because that is the whole point of the variety.

What it is not is complex. There is no tartness to push against the sugar and no great aromatic lift. It is a cooking and preserving apple that happens to be edible raw, rather than a dessert apple.

The old pomological verdict is that it is excellent for cooking and less desirable for fresh consumption, and four generations of cooks have agreed by using it in the kitchen.

If you want a sweet apple to eat out of hand, buy Fuji, CandyCrisp or Shizuka. Buy Pound Sweet to cook with.

No, despite being called Pumpkin Sweet in half the country. The name refers to the size and shape — large, ribbed and squat like a small pumpkin — not to the flavour.

It tastes of very sweet apple. There is no squash note in it at all, and there never was.

Barely. It belongs to a nineteenth-century category American pomologists simply called “sweet apples” — varieties with so little acid that they read as sugar almost unrelieved.

That is why it needs lemon or a sharp apple in almost any dish you make with it. A Pound Sweet pie with no acid added tastes flat no matter what else you do.

Yellow, marbled with greenish-yellow, usually with a brown flush over part of the fruit and a good deal of scarfskin — the fine whitish bloom-like layer that gives old apples a slightly hazy look. There are often russet patches too.

It is not a pretty apple by modern standards. It looks exactly like what it is: a large, working, nineteenth-century farm apple.

Large and blocky — described as rectangular to truncate-conic, with distinct ribs running down the fruit. Squat and angular rather than round.

That shape, more than anything, is where the Pumpkin Sweet name came from.

Yellow, firm and crisp — firmer than you might expect from an apple this sweet, and one of the reasons it bakes so well.

Very sweet apples are often soft and mealy. Pound Sweet is not, which is a large part of why it survived when most of the old sweet apples did not.

Firm and crisp, yes, though not in the modern explosive sense. It is dense rather than shattering — the texture of an apple bred to be cooked rather than crunched.

The firmness is what makes it hold its shape in a pie, a pan or a preserving kettle.

Yes, noticeably. Tough and smooth, with russet patches and scarfskin, and it does not soften much in cooking.

Most people peel it for baking, and on a fruit approaching a pound that is no great hardship — one apple peels in the time three small ones would.

A thin whitish layer over the skin that makes an apple look hazy or slightly frosted, as though it has been dusted. It is a normal feature of some varieties and not a defect, a disease or a residue.

Pound Sweet carries a good deal of it. Modern varieties have largely been selected away from it because shoppers read it as dullness, which is another small way the old apples were edited out.

By the ground colour turning from green to a fuller yellow, and by weight — and with one important warning: Pound Sweet ripens unevenly. That is a documented characteristic of the variety, not a fault in your tree.

So a single tree will give you ripe and unripe fruit at the same time, and you may need to pick over it more than once. That is one of several reasons it fell out of commerce.

It has a documented tendency to, yes. Watercore is translucent, water-soaked-looking tissue near the core in very ripe fruit, caused by sorbitol accumulating in the cell spaces.

It is intensely sweet and not a defect in eating terms. Modern grading treats it as one because it shortens storage life — but in Japan a watercored Fuji commands a premium. Two markets, opposite conclusions, same fruit.

At a normal rate. It is not one of the slow-browning varieties, and it is rarely relevant — almost everything you do with this apple involves heat.

If you need slices that hold their colour, use AutumnCrisp, SnowSweet or Fortune.

Not particularly. It is a sugar apple rather than a perfume apple, and nobody in the nineteenth century praised its scent.

For aroma in an heirloom, look at Lady, which is strikingly perfumed, or Northern Spy.

No. It predates genetics as a science by several decades — it was already growing in Connecticut in the 1830s, when Gregor Mendel was a child.

It is a chance seedling, propagated ever since by grafting. Every Pound Sweet tree alive is a cutting from that original.

Three reasons, none of them about how it cooks. It is plain to look at in a market that buys on appearance. It ripens unevenly, which means picking a tree more than once. And its whole economic advantage — sugar you did not have to buy — evaporated when cane sugar became cheap.

The apple did not change. The reasons to want it did.

Because sugar cost money and apples did not. This is the single most useful thing to understand about Pound Sweet, and it explains an entire vanished category of American apples.

In the 1800s refined cane sugar was an expensive imported commodity for most rural households. An apple sweet enough to make apple butter and sauce with no added sugar at all was therefore worth real money — not as a luxury, but as a substitute for one.

A recognised category in nineteenth-century American pomology: varieties with very high sugar and very low acid, grown deliberately and listed separately from the “sour” or dessert apples.

Pound Sweet is one. Others included Orange Sweet, Northern Sweet, Tolman Sweet, Sweet Bough and Ramsdell Sweet. There were dozens. Almost none of them are grown today, because the economic reason to grow them is gone.

Routinely, and Pound Sweet was one of the apples they did it with. Cook a very sweet low-acid apple down for long enough and the sugars concentrate and caramelise on their own.

Modern apple butter recipes assume you will add a cup or two of sugar. With this apple you genuinely do not have to, and the result tastes more of apple for it.

Yes, and on a serious scale. Orchards near Conneaut, Ohio grew it specifically for apple butter making during the Civil War era. The butter was shipped in kegs and barrels and sold for 10 to 25 cents a gallon.

That is an apple with an industry attached to it, not a curiosity. Very few heirlooms have that kind of documented commercial record.

We cannot tell you numerically, because no one has measured it. What we can tell you is that nobody ever made sugar-free apple butter commercially from Fuji or Gala, and they did from this.

The modern sweet apples are sweet and balanced — bred for eating. Pound Sweet is sweet and almost nothing else, which is a different thing.

Cheap sugar. As refined cane and beet sugar became industrially produced and inexpensive, the entire economic case for a sugar-substitute apple collapsed. A variety grown because it saved you money stopped saving you money.

And these apples had no second string. They were plain to look at and only fair to eat fresh, so once the preserving advantage went there was nothing to keep them in the orchard.

Yes, and that was a real part of the farm economy rather than a way of disposing of waste. Pound Sweet is recorded as a stock-feed apple alongside Orange Sweet and Northern Sweet.

Sugar is energy. A tree producing hundreds of pounds of very sweet fruit was a feed crop that harvested itself, on land that also produced human food. Nineteenth-century farms wasted very little.

It is why it existed. What kept it alive after cheap sugar arrived is that it is genuinely a very good cooking apple — firm, large, holds its shape, needs no sweetening.

Heritage orchards, preservers and bakers keep it going now. It survives on merit rather than economics, which is a better reason.

Enormously, and it is the single most useful practical tip on this page. Add acid to almost everything you make with Pound Sweet. Lemon juice, cider vinegar in a chutney, or a third of a sharp apple in the pot.

Without it, pies and sauces taste flat and cloying no matter how good the pastry is. The sugar is already there; what the dish is missing is the counterweight.

Yes, and substantially. For sauce and apple butter, start with none at all and taste at the end — that is what the apple is for. For a pie, start at about a third of what the recipe says.

Then spend what you saved on acid instead. A tablespoon of lemon juice will do more for the finished dish than half a cup of sugar.

For cooking, it is about the most useful apple there is — it lets you make sauce, butter and baked dishes with no added sweetener and still have them taste sweet.

To be clear about what that does and does not mean: the sugar is in the fruit rather than added to the dish. We make no dietary or health claims about any apple.

Baking, frying, preserving and desserts, and one lovely specific: it was stewed with quince, which is an inspired pairing — quince brings the aromatic perfume and the acid that this apple entirely lacks.

It was also dried, made into cider (as a sweetening component), and fed to stock. A nineteenth-century farm apple earned its place several ways over.

It is a sweetening component rather than a cider apple on its own — very sweet, very gentle, and short on the bite a good cider needs.

Blend it with something sharp such as Golden Russet or GoldRush and it earns its place.

Two words, two facts. Pound because the fruit runs large to very large — often close to a pound apiece. Sweet because it is one of the sweetest and lowest-acid apples in American pomology.

Nineteenth-century apple names were usually descriptive rather than clever. This one tells you everything you need to know before you pick it up.

Because of the shape. It is large, blocky and distinctly ribbed — rectangular to truncate-conic, with ribs running down the fruit — which reads as pumpkin-like on a shelf.

It has nothing to do with flavour. There is no pumpkin or squash note in the apple whatever, and this is the most common misunderstanding about the variety.

At least eleven in the records: Pound Sweet, Pound Sweeting, Pumpkin Sweet, Pumpkin Sweeting, Sweet Pumpkin, Lyman’s Pumpkin Sweet, Rhode Island Sweet, Round Sweet, Vermont Sweet, Vermont Pumpkin Sweet and Yankee Apple.

That is what happens to a useful apple that spreads through New England and the Midwest by farmers passing scion wood to each other, in an era before nursery catalogues standardised anything.

Because it travelled as scion wood rather than as a branded product. A farmer took a cutting, grafted it, and called it whatever the person who gave it to him called it — or whatever made sense locally.

Hence Rhode Island Sweet and Vermont Sweet for the same Connecticut apple. The name recorded where you got it, not where it came from.

The same apple, named for the man in whose orchard it was first recorded — S. Lyman of Manchester, Connecticut, in 1834.

Of all eleven names it is the most historically precise, since it points at the documented origin rather than at a shape or a state.

No, though both belong to the vanished sweet-apple category and both are New England heirlooms. Tolman Sweet is a smaller, rounder, pale yellow apple.

They were used for similar things — baking, preserving, stock feed — for the same economic reason.

Two words in the historical record: Pound Sweet, or Pound Sweeting. The closed-up spelling is a modern retail convention.

Either will find you the same apple. The variety has never been trademarked and has no official modern spelling to enforce.

The same apple. Pumpkin Sweet is simply the commoner name in some regions and Pound Sweet in others, and a good many sources list both in the same entry.

If a nursery offers you both as separate varieties, ask them to trace it to S. Lyman of Manchester, Connecticut. Reputable heritage nurseries can.

It is one of the recorded synonyms, and it reflects how thoroughly this variety belonged to New England farm life — a Connecticut apple that spread through Vermont, Rhode Island and beyond, and that turned up in every farmhouse kitchen in autumn.

It is not an official or exclusive name. Several old New England varieties have been called that at one time or another.

Emphatically. Documented in 1834 and almost certainly older, from a Connecticut farm orchard, propagated by grafting ever since.

It is among the older American varieties still grown, in company with Roxbury Russet, Golden Russet and Northern Spy.

A Connecticut orchardist in Manchester, in whose orchard this variety was first formally recorded in 1834. Beyond that the record is thin, which is entirely normal for the period.

Apple varieties circulated locally for years or decades before anyone wrote them down, so “first recorded in Lyman’s orchard” means the first time somebody took note — not necessarily the first time it grew.

Manchester, Connecticut, first formally recorded in 1834 in the orchard of S. Lyman. It is one of the older documented American varieties still in cultivation.

“First recorded” is doing real work in that sentence. Varieties circulated locally for years before anyone wrote them down, so the tree was almost certainly older than the record.

Nobody knows, and the honest answer is that “discovered” is the wrong word. It was a chance seedling — an apple that grew from a stray pip in a Connecticut farm orchard and turned out to be worth keeping.

What the record gives is the first person to write it down: S. Lyman of Manchester, Connecticut, in 1834. Whether he raised the original tree or simply had it in his orchard when a pomologist came through, the sources do not say. Crediting a discoverer is a much later habit than this apple is.

Documented to 1834, so at least 190 years, and probably older than the documentation. That puts it in the same generation as Northern Spy (about 1800) and rather younger than Roxbury Russet, the oldest named American variety.

Every Pound Sweet tree alive today is a graft descended from that one Connecticut seedling — a clone, unbroken, for nearly two centuries.

Yes, and in quantity. Orchards near Conneaut, Ohio grew it specifically for apple butter making during the Civil War era, and the butter was shipped in kegs and barrels and sold for 10 to 25 cents a gallon.

That is an unusually concrete commercial record for an heirloom — a named product, a named place, and a price.

Because it solved a storage problem. Fresh apples rot; apple butter keeps for a year in a sealed keg and travels well. Before refrigeration and canning were widespread, cooking fruit down to a preserve was how you moved a September crop into February.

And with an apple this sweet you did not need to buy sugar to do it, which changed the economics entirely.

The same way every American variety spread before nurseries: as scion wood, carried west by settlers and passed between farmers. New England emptied into the Western Reserve of Ohio through the early 1800s, and the apples went along.

That is also how it collected so many names. By the time it reached Ohio it was being called several different things.

Not at any scale. It survives with heritage orchards, preservers, cider makers and direct-market growers like us.

Its commercial decline is unusually well explained: cheap sugar removed the reason to plant it, and it is plain-looking and uneven-ripening in a market that rewards neither.

Three specific reasons, and none is about quality. Cheap cane sugar destroyed its economic advantage. It ripens unevenly, so a tree must be picked more than once. And it is plain to look at — yellow, ribbed, russet-patched and scarfskinned — in a market that buys on appearance.

That is the same pattern as Golden Russet losing on looks and Lady losing on size. The apple was fine; the criteria changed.

Conneaut sits at the northeast corner of Ohio, in what was the Connecticut Western Reserve — land claimed by Connecticut and settled largely by New Englanders.

So a Connecticut apple being grown commercially in Conneaut is not a coincidence. It went west with the people who knew it.

There were dozens. Orange Sweet, Northern Sweet, Tolman Sweet, Sweet Bough and Ramsdell Sweet are among those still occasionally grown; most of the rest are gone.

Pound Sweet is the best survivor of the category, which is why it is the one you can still buy.

It was well regarded there — described as highly valued in the South and excellent for baking or canning, which fits an apple whose whole virtue is preserving.

Its low acid also suits warmer growing regions, where acid in apples tends to fall anyway.

Not in any pedigree we can find. It is a chance seedling from the 1830s and does not appear as a parent of the modern commercial varieties.

That is itself informative. The sweet-apple line was a dead end in breeding terms, because breeders after 1900 were selecting for balance and appearance, not for sugar as a substitute commodity.

Because the economics is the explanation. You cannot understand why anyone bred, planted and named dozens of nearly acid-free apples unless you know that sugar was expensive and apples were not.

Every other page about this variety tells you it is sweet. The interesting question is why anyone wanted it that way, and the answer is a price.

Large to very large — often close to a pound apiece, which is where the name came from. Ours typically run about 280 to 500 grams.

That puts it in the same class as Shizuka and Mutsu, and at the opposite extreme from Lady apples at six to ten to the pound.

One to one and a half. Sometimes exactly one, which is the joke built into the name.

Check the count rather than only the weight when you order. Five pounds is five or six apples, not fifteen.

Three or four for a standard 9-inch double-crust pie, since a pie wants two and a half to three pounds of fruit.

That is very little peeling for a pie — which, given that this apple has a tough skin you probably will peel, is a genuine convenience.

Well suited, for the same reason Shizuka is: the size gives you a real cavity once cored, one apple is a serving, and the firm flesh holds together rather than bursting.

Its sweetness means you need almost nothing in the filling but butter, spice and something sharp. A splash of cider vinegar or lemon in the stuffing will do more than sugar.

Yes, and upward. A generic “medium apple” panel is based on roughly 180 to 200 grams; a Pound Sweet can be twice that or more.

So a standard panel understates one by half or more. Our nutrition section below scales the figures to this variety’s actual weight.

A bushel runs about 40 to 42 pounds, which at one to one and a half apples per pound works out to roughly 45 to 60 apples — far fewer individual fruit than any normal variety.

For an apple you are buying to preserve, weight is what matters. But the count still surprises people opening the box.

There is a real principle behind the suspicion — an overcropped, unthinned tree gives bigger, blander fruit. But Pound Sweet is genetically large, and its sweetness is the whole reason it exists.

What is fair to say is that it is a simple flavour rather than a diluted one. There is not much there besides sugar, and that is by design.

For eating raw, almost certainly — and since it is not a first-rate fresh-eating apple anyway, that rarely comes up.

For cooking it is exactly right. One apple is a baked serving, three or four are a pie, and a dozen are a batch of apple butter.

Labour. Every apple has to be washed, peeled, cored and cut, and that cost is per fruit rather than per pound. Making apple butter from twenty-five small apples is several times the work of making it from six large ones.

For a nineteenth-century household putting up barrels of butter, a one-pound apple was a meaningful saving in hands and hours.

Yes, and for two reasons. It is described as highly productive but biennial, so thinning is what keeps it cropping every year rather than in alternate ones.

And a large-fruited variety on a vigorous tree will load branches heavily. A cluster of one-pound apples on a single spur is a lot of weight.

Autumn — sources give September and others October or later, and both are right, because the variety ripens unevenly. A single tree genuinely gives ripe and unripe fruit at the same time.

See Harvest Times for where our crop actually stands. With this variety more than most, the answer is “some of it”.

Very low-acid apples are generally poor keepers, because acid is part of what preserves an apple.

In a home refrigerator expect a few weeks at good quality. That is precisely why the historical use was preserving: you cooked the crop into something that would keep.

Low acid and a tendency to watercore. Acid contributes to an apple’s keeping quality, and watercored tissue breaks down faster than sound flesh.

It is worth understanding that this is the same trait bundle that makes it valuable. High sugar, low acid and watercore come together, and so do sweetness and short storage.

Cold and humid — the crisper drawer, in a loosely closed bag with a few holes. Do not wash before storing.

Given the short keeping, the better plan is usually to process within a fortnight: a batch of apple butter or sauce in the freezer outlasts the fresh fruit by a year.

Yes, and for this variety it is the sensible move. Peel, core, slice, tray-freeze, then bag. About a year, and they come out well for pie, crisp, sauce and butter.

Because the apple is not a fresh-eating star, losing crispness to freezing costs you nothing you were going to use.

Broadly yes. It does not reward keeping the way GoldRush or WineCrisp do, and it does not hold like Fortune.

Buy it, cook it, and put the result in jars or the freezer. That is what this apple has been for since 1834.

The flesh is firm, which helps, but the fruit is very heavy — and a pound of apple dropped a foot lands hard. Watercored fruit is also softer internally than it looks.

Handle it in shallow layers rather than deep bins, and process anything bruised first.

You can, with realistic expectations — weeks rather than the months a good keeper gives. 32 to 38 °F and high humidity, shallow layers, checked weekly.

For genuine winter storage buy GoldRush or EverCrisp. Use the Pound Sweet crop for preserving.

It moves with the season and it ripens unevenly, so we do not publish a fixed date. Harvest Times tracks where each variety stands.

Apple Crop Growing 2026 lists what is still on the tree, and Ready to Ship shows what is leaving the farm today.

No. Washing strips the natural bloom and leaves water in the stem cavity, which is where rot starts — and on a short-keeping apple you have less margin for that.

Store dry, wash at the point of use. Our general handling advice is on the Honeycrisp.com apple FAQ.

Yes. Watercore is translucent, water-soaked-looking tissue near the core in very ripe fruit, caused by sorbitol in the cell spaces. It is intensely sweet and not spoilage.

It does shorten storage life, so eat or cook watercored fruit first. If the flesh is brown and smells fermented rather than translucent and smelling sweet, that is a different thing — discard it.

Very well, and it is a traditional use. A high-sugar apple dries to something genuinely sweet without any dipping in syrup, and the large diameter gives handsome big rings.

Slice an eighth of an inch, dip briefly in acidulated water for colour, and dry at 135 °F for six to ten hours.

Preserving, above everything — apple butter, sauce and canned filling, made with little or no added sugar. After that: baking, frying, drying and stewing.

It is not a salad apple and it is not a first-rate eating apple. Buying Pound Sweet to snack on is buying the wrong apple; buying it to put up for the winter is buying exactly the right one.

It is arguably the best apple in America for it, and there is nearly two centuries of evidence. Orchards near Conneaut, Ohio grew it commercially for apple butter during the Civil War era.

Start with no sugar at all. Cook it down slowly for hours with cider and spice, add lemon or a little cider vinegar near the end for balance, and taste before you reach for the sugar tin. You probably will not need it.

Yes, and again with no added sugar. It cooks down to a pale, thick, genuinely sweet sauce.

It will taste flat without acid. Add lemon juice, or cook it with a third of a sharp apple — Granny Smith, Northern Spy or GoldRush. That single adjustment is the difference between a good sauce and a cloying one.

Good, with two adjustments. Cut the sugar to about a third of what the recipe says, and add acid — a good squeeze of lemon, or blend in a sharp variety.

The firm flesh holds its shape well, and three or four apples fill a pie. What it will not give you is complexity; that has to come from the spice, the acid or the blend.

Yes, well. The flesh is firm and crisp for such a sweet apple, and that is one of the main reasons the variety survived when most old sweet apples did not.

Expect distinct slices rather than a collapsed layer. It is not as rigid as Rome, which is still the apple for baked-whole.

For most cooking, yes. The skin is genuinely tough, carries russet patches and scarfskin, and does not soften much with heat.

The exception is sauce and butter made with a food mill — cook it skin-on and mill the skins out afterwards, which saves the peeling and gains you colour.

Yes, and it is a documented historical use. Thick rings in butter in a hot pan until they caramelise — and with this much sugar they caramelise readily.

Serve with pork, sausage, black pudding or bacon. Salt after cooking, and a splash of cider vinegar in the pan at the end does what the apple cannot do for itself.

An old pairing recorded for this variety, and an inspired one. Quince brings intense perfume, high acid and pectin; Pound Sweet brings sugar and bulk. Each supplies exactly what the other lacks.

Peel and slice both, cook slowly with a little water until the quince turns pink, and you have something neither fruit could produce alone. It needs no sugar.

Very. It is described as excellent for baking or canning, and its firmness means slices survive processing without turning to mush — the usual failure of canned pie filling.

Add lemon juice to the syrup. Canning recipes assume a normal apple’s acidity, which this one does not have.

Excellently, and this is an underused modern application. Chutney wants sugar and acid, and with Pound Sweet the sugar is already in the fruit — so you add vinegar, onion, ginger and spice and skip most of the sweetening.

The firm flesh holds its shape through a long simmer rather than dissolving.

Not really. Salads want acid and a clean crisp bite, and this apple brings sugar and a tough skin.

Use Fortune, which is slow to brown and properly balanced, or Lady apples for their scale and aroma.

Yes — it presses a very sweet, low-acid juice and a lot of it, given the size of the fruit.

On its own it tastes cloying. Blend it with something sharp and it becomes the sweetening backbone of a good cider, which is precisely how nineteenth-century cider makers used sweet apples.

Close to it, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. Pound Sweet has almost no acid, and acid is what makes sweetness read as flavour rather than as sugar.

A tablespoon of lemon juice in a pie filling, a splash of cider vinegar in a chutney or a pan sauce, or a third of a sharp apple in the pot. It will do more for the dish than anything else you can add.

Apple butter with no added sugar. It is what the variety was grown commercially for, it is what its sweetness is actually for, and it is the one dish where having no acid and enormous sugar is a pure advantage rather than something to correct.

Cook it down for hours, spice it heavily, finish with a little acid, and jar it. That is the apple doing exactly what it was kept alive to do.

Yes, and it caramelises beautifully because of the sugar. Cut the sugar in the caramel back, and put lemon juice in.

The firm flesh survives long caramelisation without collapsing. Three or four apples fill a 9-inch pan.

Very, with the usual two corrections: less sugar in both the filling and the topping, and lemon juice in the filling.

Three apples fill a large dish. The firm flesh means you get distinct fruit under the crumble rather than a sweet purée.

A medium Pound Sweet — about 390 grams — is roughly 190 to 215 calories. A small one is nearer 135 to 155; a large one runs 245 to 275.

The figure to work from is 52 calories per 100 grams, from USDA, for a raw apple with the skin on. Pound Sweet is a very large apple, so one of ours goes a long way further than a standard medium.

A large Pound Sweet of about 500 grams comes to roughly 245 to 275 calories.

Across the sizes we pack: small (~280 g) about 146, medium (~390 g) about 203, large (~500 g) about 260. Multiply the weight in grams by 0.52 for a close estimate at any size.

A small Pound Sweet of about 280 grams is roughly 135 to 155 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 Pound Sweet 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 390 grams that is roughly 203 calories, 54 g carbohydrate and 9.4 g fiber. The full table by size is in the nutrition section above.

About 50 to 58 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, of which roughly 9.4 grams is fiber — so approximately 45 grams of net carbs.

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

Roughly 54 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, with about 9.4 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 38 to 44 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.

Pound Sweet is exceptionally sweet — sweet enough that nineteenth-century cooks made apple butter from it without buying sugar, which in those days was expensive. That is the whole reputation of the apple in one fact.

About 9.4 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 1.0 grams of protein and 0.7 grams of fat in a medium apple, and virtually no sodium.

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

About 107 mg per 100 grams, so roughly 417 mg in a medium apple.

That is typical for an apple.

About 17.9 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.

Pound Sweet skin is tough — yellow marbled with greenish-yellow, usually with a brown flush, some russet patches and a good deal of scarfskin. Most people peel it for baking, and on a fruit this large that is no great hardship. 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.

The name is the answer. Pound Sweet runs large to very large — often close to a pound apiece, which is where it got its name — so expect one to one and a half to the pound. A 9-inch pie takes three or four.

Different kinds of sweet. Fuji is sweet and balanced, bred for eating out of hand, with a clean fine-grained texture and good keeping.

Pound Sweet is sweet and very little else, bred by accident and kept for the kitchen. Nobody ever made commercial sugar-free apple butter from a Fuji.

Both are very large and very low in acid, and they overlap more than you would expect for apples from opposite sides of the world. Shizuka is a 1986 Japanese variety, floral and aromatic, with a thin waxy skin and slow browning.

Pound Sweet is older, plainer, tougher-skinned, sweeter still, and a poorer keeper. Shizuka is the better apple to eat; Pound Sweet is the better apple to preserve.

Two heirlooms that both lost commerce, for opposite reasons within the same market logic. Golden Russet was excluded for being small and brown, despite being one of the best-flavoured apples in America.

Pound Sweet was excluded because cheap sugar removed its reason to exist. Golden Russet is dense, complex and superb for cider; Pound Sweet is simple, enormous and superb for butter.

Rome holds its walls better than anything and is the classic baked-whole apple, and it tastes of very little raw or cooked.

Pound Sweet holds its shape well and brings so much sugar you can cut the recipe by two thirds. For a stuffed baked apple, either. For apple butter, Pound Sweet by a mile.

Opposites that work well together. Northern Spy is the classic tart, aromatic, complex American pie apple, with plenty of acid.

Pound Sweet has sugar and size and no acid at all. Put them in the same pot in roughly two-to-one and you get a pie that needs almost no sugar and tastes of something.

The two extremes of size in our range, and both nineteenth-century or older. Lady runs six to ten to the pound; Pound Sweet runs one to one and a half.

Lady is aromatic, decorative and good fresh. Pound Sweet is plain, enormous and made for the kettle. Between them they cover most of what an old New England kitchen wanted from apples.

Both are survivors of the vanished sweet-apple category and both were used the same way. Tolman Sweet is smaller, rounder and paler.

Pound Sweet is the larger and the better known, and it is the one you are most likely to be able to buy.

Among the old sweet apples, Tolman Sweet or Northern Sweet. Among apples you can actually get, Shizuka is the nearest in size and low acid, and CandyCrisp the nearest in sheer sweetness.

Neither is a true substitute for preserving. The combination of that much sugar with that little acid is genuinely rare now.

If you preserve, yes, and there is very little competition — it will cut the sugar out of your apple butter and your sauce entirely.

If you want an apple to eat, no, and we would rather tell you that than sell you one you will be disappointed by. Buy Fortune, Shizuka or Honeycrisp for that.

It is a good one to cook with first, because the difference from a modern apple is so obvious in the pot. Make a batch of sauce with no sugar and you understand immediately what nineteenth-century cooks valued.

If you want an heirloom to eat, start with Northern Spy or Golden Russet.

Because it is outstanding at something else, and because almost nobody grows it any more. An apple that makes sugar-free apple butter is worth keeping in the world.

We would rather explain what it is for than dress it up as something it is not. A honest description sells fewer apples to the wrong people and more to the right ones.

Per pound, more than a commodity apple: tiny plantings, uneven ripening that means picking a tree more than once, and short storage that gives no margin.

Per apple it is reasonable, because the fruit is so large. And for preserving it partly pays for itself in sugar you do not buy.

Here, shipped from the farm when the crop is in, and otherwise from heritage orchards and a handful of farm stands, mostly in New England and the Midwest.

It is not a supermarket variety anywhere. See Ready to Ship for what is leaving the farm today.

Packed so the fruit cannot shift, in shallow layers. A one-pound apple carries real momentum in a moving box, and watercored fruit is softer inside than it looks.

Full details are on our shipping information page. Refrigerate the box on arrival, and plan to process within a couple of weeks.

Yes, and for this variety bulk is the sensible way to buy — you are almost certainly preserving. Case and bulk quantities are on our bulk and case apples page.

A bushel runs 40 to 42 pounds, which at one to one and a half apples per pound is roughly 45 to 60 fruit — and a good deal of apple butter.

Apple butter reduces enormously — roughly eight to ten pounds of apples per finished quart is a reasonable planning figure, depending how far you cook it down.

So a 40-pound bushel gives you something in the region of four to five quarts of finished butter. Nineteenth-century Ohio orchards were shipping it by the barrel, which tells you the scale they were working at.

Yes. It is an 1830s heirloom with no patent, so anyone may propagate it, and heritage fruit nurseries carry it — ask for Pound Sweet or Pumpkin Sweet.

Read the growing notes below first. It is productive and it has habits. We sell fruit, not trees.

Vigorous and upright, spreading and drooping as it matures, with greenish-yellow bark and distinctly waved leaves — old pomological descriptions are precise about foliage in a way modern ones are not.

It is highly productive. It is also biennial, which is the main thing to plan around.

Yes, that is documented. It will crop heavily one year and lightly the next unless you intervene.

The intervention is thinning, early — four to six weeks after bloom, down to one fruit per cluster. That is what breaks the cycle, and on a variety this heavy-cropping it also protects the branches.

It does, and it is a recorded characteristic rather than a growing fault. A single tree will carry ripe and unripe fruit at the same time.

For a home grower that is almost an advantage — you pick over the tree two or three times and extend the season. For a commercial grower it is a serious cost, and it is one of the reasons the variety left commerce.

Rootstock governs it, as with any apple — 8 to 12 feet on a dwarfing stock, 12 to 18 on semi-dwarf, 20 feet and up on standard.

The variety itself is vigorous, so on a heavy soil choose a more dwarfing rootstock than you think you need, particularly since the fruit weight will pull the branches down anyway.

Any compatible diploid apple or flowering crabapple blooming at the same time. We have found no published pollination group for the variety, so the general rule applies.

Avoid relying on a triploid — Mutsu, Jonagold, Shizuka and Winesap all have sterile pollen.

A rewarding one if you preserve, and an odd choice if you do not. You get a large crop of very sweet apples that will be sauce, butter and dried rings by November.

It is a working tree rather than an ornamental one, which is exactly what it always was.

Historically yes — it was grown as a sweet, heavy-cropping apple that fed people and animals alike, and the fruit is enormous.

These days most people grow it for apple butter, which is what made its name in the first place.

Ask us. We grow it, pick it and ship it, and there is very little reliable modern information about this variety anywhere — most of what exists is a single line copied between nursery listings.

Contact details and our general handling advice are on the Honeycrisp.com apple FAQ, and the full apple varieties guide puts every apple we grow side by side.