Lady Apples

Sweet, clean and remarkably aromatic for something so small. The historic pomological records describe the flesh as white, firm, fine-grained, crisp, tender and juicy, with a pleasant aroma and a flavour running from mild subacid to nearly sweet, and they rate the overall quality as excellent.

People reach for honey, citrus peel, dried fruit and a faint nuttiness. The aroma is the part that surprises everyone — a bowl of Lady apples scents a room.

Sweet, with just enough acid to keep it clean. The old descriptions put it between mild subacid and nearly sweet, which in modern terms means a gentle, non-aggressive apple.

It is not a sharp apple. If you want acid, look at GoldRush or Granny Smith. If you want something a child will eat whole without complaint, this is close to ideal.

Yes — firm, fine-grained and crisp, with a thin skin that snaps rather than tears. Because the fruit is so small, the whole bite is different from a large apple: less flesh, more skin, and a much cleaner break.

It is not the explosive texture of a Honeycrisp. It is closer to a very good crabapple that happens to be sweet.

A bright red blush or full red cheek over a creamy pale yellow ground, with a smooth, glossy, almost waxed-looking skin. Some fruit is nearly all red, some keeps a lot of yellow, and the contrast is exactly why the variety became a decoration.

Historical descriptions record the skin as moderately thick, tough, smooth and glossy, with red, yellow, white and red-blushed colouring across the crop.

White — notably white, against a bright red skin. Firm, fine-grained and juicy.

Halved or sliced thin, the white flesh with a red rim is why Lady apples turn up on cheese boards and cocktail garnishes far out of proportion to how many are grown.

Unusually strong for the size. “Pleasant aroma” is the polite nineteenth-century phrasing; in practice a bowlful is noticeably fragrant across a room, which is part of why they were hung on Christmas boughs.

The aroma is at its best in the first months after picking and softens over a long storage.

Round and distinctly flattened — oblate, wider than it is tall, sometimes faintly ribbed, and usually very symmetrical. The stem sits in a shallow, neat basin.

That squat, tidy, almost manufactured shape is a large part of why it looks so good in a bowl or on a wreath.

By the ground colour under the blush: it should have turned from green to a warm creamy yellow. Ladies are picked late — late October into November in most of the North.

They also hang well and do not drop readily, which is one reason they can be left to colour properly.

Yes, and you have no realistic alternative. On a fruit under two inches across, peeling would remove a significant proportion of what you are eating and take you twenty minutes to do a handful.

The skin is thin, smooth and glossy. Nobody peels a Lady apple. Wash it and eat it whole.

Two or three, usually. They are about the size of a large plum or a golf ball, and they are meant to be eaten whole — core, seeds and all is a matter of taste, but plenty of people do.

That is the whole point of the variety as a dessert fruit. It is a single serving that does not need a knife, a plate or a napkin.

At a normal rate for an apple, but it is rarely relevant — you are generally eating them whole or halving them at the last moment.

If you are slicing a lot of them for a platter, a quick dip in acidulated water works as it does for any variety. Or use AutumnCrisp, which barely browns at all.

Genuinely good to eat, and we would push back on the idea that they are ornamental only. The pomological record rates their quality as excellent, they were one of the seven apples Louis XIV wanted served at Versailles, and in the 1840s they sold in London for a higher price than any other apple.

That is not the history of a fruit people bought to look at. The decorative use came later and has rather eclipsed the eating.

No. A crabapple is defined by size — under two inches — which a Lady apple technically meets, but crabapples are generally a different thing: usually seedling or ornamental trees with astringent, mouth-puckering fruit.

Lady is a full Malus domestica dessert variety that simply happens to be very small and very sweet. It is a proper apple in miniature, not a crab.

Somewhat, and the reason is geometry rather than genetics. A small fruit has far more skin per unit of flesh, and a great deal of an apple’s aroma sits in and just under the skin.

So a Lady apple eats more aromatic and more intense than its flavour would suggest on paper. Small fruit concentrates the interesting parts.

Proportionally, yes. The core is close to normal size while the fruit around it is not, so there is less flesh per apple than the outside suggests.

In practice most people eat them whole and the question does not arise. It matters only if you are coring twenty-five of them for a pie, at which point the answer is: use a different apple.

They work, and the high skin-to-flesh ratio is an advantage for once — skins carry both wild yeast and flavour. Press or cook and strain, ferment to hard cider, then let it go to vinegar.

Because the juice is sweet and low in acid, expect a mild, aromatic vinegar rather than a sharp one. Blend in a sharper variety if you want more bite.

No. The variety predates genetics as a science by roughly two and a half centuries — it was being grown before Gregor Mendel’s grandparents were born.

It is a chance seedling, propagated ever since by grafting. The only genetically engineered apples sold in the United States are the Arctic varieties, which are labelled as such.

Under two inches across — about the size of a golf ball or a large plum. Ours run roughly 40 to 80 grams, against 180 to 250 for an ordinary supermarket apple.

The pomological records classify it as “small to very small”, which is about as emphatic as nineteenth-century pomologists got.

Because weight, not count, is how apples are sold — and a Lady apple weighs about a third of an ordinary one. Six to ten of them make a pound where two or three Galas would.

This is the single most common thing people get wrong when ordering. A five-pound box holds somewhere between 30 and 50 individual apples, which looks like a great deal more fruit than the same weight of anything else, because it is.

Roughly twenty to twenty-five for a standard 9-inch double-crust pie, since a pie wants around two and a half to three pounds of fruit.

That is a lot of coring. Most people who bake with Ladies use them whole in a tart or blend a handful into a pie made mostly from a larger apple, which is the sensible approach.

Because that is what the variety is. It is not a stunted or unthinned crop, and it is not a picking-early problem — a perfectly ripe, well-grown Lady apple on a healthy tree is still under two inches.

Size in apples is largely genetic, and this one has been small since at least 1628. Four centuries of growers have not made it bigger and have not wanted to.

About as well suited as an apple gets. It is a single serving that fits a small hand, needs no cutting, and is sweet rather than sharp.

The usual caution applies with any small whole fruit and very young children — cut it for anyone who is not confidently eating whole apples yet.

Yes, and by more than people expect. Nutrition figures scale with weight, and a Lady apple is roughly a third of a standard apple.

So a “medium apple” nutrition panel overstates a Lady apple by about three times. Our nutrition section below gives the figures at a Lady apple’s actual weight rather than a generic one.

Depends on the wreath, but the working figure most people use is about a dozen apples to a standard 18-inch wreath if they are the feature, or twenty-plus for a dense Della Robbia style arrangement.

Buy more than you think. Some will be the wrong shape, and you will eat a few.

Among the smallest full dessert varieties, yes, though there are others in the same class — and true crabapples are smaller still.

What makes Lady unusual is not being small. It is being small and sweet and good enough that Louis XIV wanted it on the table.

Yes, and that is actually a horticultural problem. Because the flesh around the seeds is so thin, the apple-seed chalcid — a tiny wasp that lays its eggs inside apple seeds — can reach them with its ovipositor.

In a large apple the depth of flesh physically protects the seed. In a Lady it does not, which makes the variety unusually prone to that particular pest.

Whole, in a bowl, and let people take them. That is what they were bred for and what four hundred years of hosts have done with them.

Beyond that: halved on a cheese board, whole on a roasting tray around pork, poached whole in wine or cider, or stem-on as a garnish. Any use that would look fussy with a large apple looks right with these.

By weight, like every other apple, which is exactly what trips people up. A pound of Ladies is six to ten apples where a pound of Galas is three.

If you are buying for a wreath or a table, work out how many fruit you need first and then convert. Roughly eight to the pound is a safe planning figure.

No, and this is far and away the most common confusion. Pink Lady is a trademark for the modern Australian cultivar Cripps Pink — a Golden Delicious × Lady Williams cross from the 1970s, full sized, and sold worldwide.

The Lady apple is a French heirloom recorded in 1628, under two inches across. They share one word and nothing else — not parentage, not century, not continent, not size.

No. Lady Alice is a modern Washington State variety discovered as a chance seedling in the 1970s and marketed from the 2000s. It is a full-sized, striped, sweet-tart apple.

Again, a shared word and nothing more. There is also Lady Williams, an Australian variety and a parent of Pink Lady, which is a third unrelated apple with “Lady” in the name.

The name is English and comparatively recent. The variety’s own name is French — Pomme d’Api — and it has been called Api in France for centuries.

“Lady apple” came into use in North America, and the story usually given is that the fruit was small and neat enough for a lady to eat in company without a knife. The name then travelled back across the Atlantic: the variety was re-imported into Victorian England from the United States under the name Lady Apple.

The same apple. Pomme d’Api is the French name, and Api by itself is the usual short form. If you meet it in a French market, a French cookbook or a French still life painting, that is what you are looking at.

Where the word Api comes from is the interesting question, and it is the subject of the Roman section below.

An extraordinary number — the standard cultivar databases list more than twenty. Among them: Api, Petit Api, Petit Api Rouge, Pomme d’Api, Pomme d’Api Rouge, Api Rose, Api Rouge, Api Fin, Api Petit, Api Ordinaire, Lille Api, Almindelig Api, Gros Api Rouge, Kleiner Apple, Cardinale, Pomme Rose, Long Bois, Lady Sweet, Lady’s Finger, Wax Apple and Christmas Apple.

Four centuries in half a dozen countries will do that. The table above lists them.

This one. It is one of the oldest nicknames for the variety and it comes from the use rather than the fruit: Lady apples ripen very late, keep for months, and look like ornaments.

They have been hung on boughs, wired into wreaths, piled into Della Robbia arrangements and packed into Christmas hampers for centuries. In 1908 a French folklore journal recorded Protestant families in Alsace decorating oak boughs with ribbons, angel figures, sweets and lady apples.

A sister variety — the Black Lady Apple. Same small size and shape, but the skin is so dark a red it reads as nearly black.

It is a distinct cultivar, not a sport of the red one, and it is considerably rarer.

The Star Lady Apple, and the strangest member of the family. It is deep yellow with red patches and has pronounced angular ribs, so that a cross-section comes out as a rough five-pointed star.

It is grown almost entirely for that. Cut crosswise it is one of the few apples that genuinely looks like something other than an apple.

Several. Alongside the standard red Api there is Api Noir (nearly black), Api Etoile (star-shaped in section), Api Gros or Pomme Rose (a little larger, pale green to yellow), and Api Panaché (striped red and yellow).

Seedling descendants include Helen and Highland Beauty. It is a small family of small apples.

“Wax apple” is one of the old English nicknames for this variety, from the smooth, glossy, almost polished skin.

Confusingly, “wax apple” is also a common name for the tropical fruit Syzygium samarangense, which is not an apple at all and is unrelated. Context usually makes it clear which one is meant.

That is the most widely repeated explanation, and it is at least a plausible one: the variety is generally said to have been found as a chance seedling in the Forest of Api in Brittany before the early seventeenth century.

It is also possible the forest and the apple simply share a regional name. We would not claim to know which way the naming ran.

They are members of the same small Api family and share the name, the size class and much of the character. Api Etoile is the one with pronounced ribs, so that a crosswise cut gives a rough five-pointed star.

Whether they are literally parent and seedling or simply regional relatives is not settled in the literature we can find, so we will not assert it.

Probably not, and we are going to give you the actual evidence rather than the legend, because the legend is repeated almost everywhere.

The story goes that Api derives from the Appiana, an apple named for a Roman called Appius and recorded by Pliny the Elder in the first century. The link is essentially the resemblance between the words Api and Appiana. Continental pomologists have long disputed it, and when you read what Pliny actually wrote the difficulty becomes clear.

In Book XV of the Natural History, Pliny records that a member of the Claudian family named Appius grafted a quince onto a Scaudian apple, producing the fruit called Appian — which, he says, has the smell of a quince, the size of a Scaudian apple, and a ruddy colour.

That is a graft experiment involving quince, described by its quince scent. It is not obviously a description of a very small, very sweet red dessert apple. Read plainly, Pliny’s Appiana and the Lady apple do not sound like the same fruit.

From the name, mostly. Api and Appiana look alike, and pomological writing has a long habit of reaching backwards for a Roman pedigree — it is a flattering thing to be able to say about a fruit.

Some versions add an Etruscan farmer named Appius, or Consul Appius Claudius bringing the apple to Rome from the Peloponnese. These are decorations on the same thin thread. We have found no evidence that survives contact with a primary source.

Possibly two, and Api is generally not among them. The serious scholarly discussion of surviving Roman apples centres on Decio and Court Pendu Plat, both of which have at least an arguable case.

That is worth knowing. The researchers who have worked hardest on the question of which apples might be genuinely ancient did not put the Lady apple on the list.

In principle, yes — apples do not come true from seed, so every tree of a named variety is a graft, a clone, of one original plant. A variety can in theory be carried forward indefinitely by grafting.

In practice the difficulty is documentary rather than biological. Names drift, get reused, and get applied to different fruit in different centuries. Proving that the apple called X today is the apple called X in AD 77 is nearly impossible without the tree in front of you.

Firmly documented to at least 1628, in Brittany, in north-west France. That is nearly four hundred years, which makes it one of the oldest varieties still in commercial cultivation anywhere.

We think that is a more impressive claim than the Roman one, because it is true and can be shown. We would rather sell you four hundred documented years than two thousand undocumented ones.

Because we would rather you could trust the rest of the page. If we repeat a legend as fact because it makes the apple sound better, nothing else we tell you is worth much either.

It is also the more interesting story. An apple that has been continuously grafted and grown since before the reign of Louis XIV does not need a Roman consul attached to it.

Among the oldest still grown commercially, but not provably the oldest. Court Pendu Plat, Decio, Reinette Franche and one or two others have claims that run at least as far back, and some have better ones.

What we can say is that it is documented to 1628, was on the royal table in the seventeenth century, and is still being grown and sold in 2026. Very few named varieties can show that.

There were several. The best known is Appius Claudius Caecus, the censor who built the Appian Way and Rome’s first aqueduct around 312 BC. Various retellings of the apple legend attach it to him, to an unnamed Etruscan farmer called Appius, or simply to “a member of the Claudian family”.

That last is what Pliny actually wrote, and it is notably vaguer than the versions in circulation. Pliny names no consul and tells no story about the Peloponnese.

Another Roman fruit name, and part of why Pliny’s passage is hard to read across two thousand years. He says the Appian was made by grafting quince onto a Scaudian, and that it kept the Scaudian’s size.

Translators disagree even about what a Scaudian was — one reading makes it an apple, another a pear, which is botanically more plausible for a quince graft. When the translators cannot agree on the parent, a confident lineage to a modern variety is not available.

Brittany, in north-west France, documented to at least 1628. The usual account is that it was found as a chance seedling in the Forest of Api, which is also the most common explanation of the name.

From there it reached the royal orchards. It was one of the seven apples Louis XIV liked to be served, and Api trees still grow in the gardens at Versailles.

With the Huguenots. French Protestants fleeing persecution settled in colonial Flushing — in what is now Queens, New York — from around the 1660s, with a further wave after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They were expert fruit growers, and the Lady apple came with them.

Out of that community grew America’s first commercial nursery. Robert Prince was raising trees at Flushing by around 1730; the Prince nurseries later supplied Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and propagated plant material brought back by Lewis and Clark.

Very. Beach’s The Apples of New York (1905) records that it “has long been recognized in the New York market as one of the most desirable apples for fancy trade at the holiday season”.

And it was an export. By the 1840s large shipments of Lady apples were going from New York to London for Christmas, where they sold at a higher price than any other apple. A French heirloom, grown in New York, shipped to England, at the top of the market.

Size, and the economics that follow from it. Modern fruit is bought and sold by count and by grade, and a variety that gives you eight apples to the pound is expensive to pick, expensive to pack and impossible to sell by the usual measures.

Nothing about the fruit changed. What changed was a distribution system built entirely around apples of a standard size. The same logic pushed Golden Russet out for its looks.

The French court, among others. It was in Louis XIV’s orchards at Versailles, where the king’s gardeners were selecting fruit for the royal table, and it was one of the seven apples he wanted served.

Api trees are still grown in the Versailles gardens today, which is a reasonable claim to continuity for a variety.

America’s first commercial nursery, at Flushing, New York. Robert Prince began growing trees and shrubs around 1700 and established an eight-acre nursery around 1730; his son William expanded it enormously.

It remained the best nursery in America until the mid-nineteenth century, sold to Jefferson and Washington and to southern landowners, shipped to England and Europe, and propagated specimens from the Lewis and Clark expeditions. The Lady apple is part of that same Huguenot fruit-growing inheritance.

French by origin and American by career. It was recorded in Brittany by 1628 and grown at Versailles. It was then carried to New York by Huguenot refugees, and it was New York growers who made it a commercial fruit and shipped it back across the Atlantic.

By Victorian times it was being re-imported into England from the United States under its English name, Lady Apple. Very few varieties have made that round trip.

In the ancestral form of them, yes. A French folklore journal in 1908 recorded Protestant families in Alsace decorating oak boughs with ribbons, angel figures, sweets and lady apples — which is essentially a Christmas tree before the fir arrived.

Apples on a decorated bough are one of the oldest strands of the tradition, and this is the apple that was small enough and pretty enough to do the job.

Yes, but by specialist and heritage growers rather than at commercial scale. You will find it at farm stands, heritage orchards, specialist produce houses and here — and in November and December, in the decorating trade.

It has survived four centuries by being wanted for something. For most of that time it was the fruit on the Christmas table.

Directly. The Huguenots were French Protestants; Louis XIV’s 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes made their religion illegal, and some 180,000 people left France between 1680 and 1715 — the largest migration in modern French history.

Those who reached Flushing were skilled fruit growers and brought their varieties with them. The Lady apple is a piece of that migration you can still eat.

Several times, which is unusual for an apple variety and tells you how recognisable it was. Henri Fantin-Latour painted Still Life with Pansies — Pommes d’api et Pensées — in 1874, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Eva Gonzalès, the only pupil Manet formally taught, painted Pommes d’Api in 1877–78, now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The American painter William J. McCloskey finished Lady Apples in Overturned Basket around 1896. Three works, two countries, one small apple.

Nobody knows, which is normal for a variety of this age. The usual account is that it was found as a chance seedling in the Forest of Api in Brittany some time before the early seventeenth century, and it was already being grown and named by 1628.

No finder’s name survives. Apple varieties circulated locally for years or decades before anyone wrote them down, and the practice of crediting a discoverer is a much later habit.

Very late. They are picked in late October and early November in the North, and in warmer or lower-lying districts from late September.

Their commercial season, though, is longer than their picking window: the historical records give a market season of December through May, because they keep so well. This is a Christmas apple by design.

Months. The old pomological records put the market season at December through May, which implies six months or more in nineteenth-century storage — before refrigeration was anything like modern.

In a home refrigerator, three to four months at good quality is a realistic expectation. The skin is thick and tough for the size, which is exactly what makes a long keeper.

Two reasons. The skin is moderately thick and tough relative to the fruit, which slows moisture loss and keeps rot out; and the flesh is firm and fine-grained rather than soft.

Being picked very late helps too — late-season apples are generally the long keepers, which is why GoldRush and EverCrisp behave the same way.

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

Keep them away from onions and anything strongly scented; a small apple with a lot of skin takes up odours readily. And away from bananas, whose ethylene hurries them along.

Somewhere between one and three weeks looking good, depending entirely on temperature. On a cool porch or in an unheated hall they will hold for weeks; over a radiator or next to a fire they will shrivel in days.

Whole fruit with the stem intact lasts far longer than anything cut or wired through the flesh. Wire around the stem where you can.

Yes, and they are worth having out — they scent a room and they look like nothing else. Expect a couple of weeks at room temperature before the texture starts to go.

Refrigerate the rest and refill the bowl. That way you get the display and the keeping quality at once.

Eventually, and dry warm air is what does it. A shrivelled Lady apple is not spoiled — the sugar is more concentrated than ever — but it has lost the glossy look that is half the point.

Humidity is the answer. Cold and humid keeps them plump; cold and dry does not.

You can, though it is rarely the best use. Halve and core them, tray-freeze, then bag. They come out soft, so use them cooked — in sauce, in a compote, or in mulled cider.

Given that they keep for months fresh, freezing is usually unnecessary. Store them cold instead.

Less than most. Small, firm, thick-skinned fruit is inherently robust, which is part of why New York growers could ship them across the Atlantic in the 1840s under sail.

They still want handling as fruit. Bruised tissue is where storage rot starts in any variety.

They move with the season, so we do not publish a fixed date. Harvest Times tracks where each variety stands as the crop comes in.

Apple Crop Growing 2026 lists what is still on the tree, and Ready to Ship shows what is leaving the farm today. Lady apples are among the last things we pick.

That is what they are for, and it is the one time of year demand outruns supply. They are picked in late October and early November and they keep for months, so the Christmas window is their natural season.

Order early. The decorating trade takes a great many of them, and there are not many growers.

No. The historic market season runs December through May and the fruit is picked in late autumn. Outside that window there simply are none.

This is a seasonal apple in the way almost nothing in a supermarket now is. See Ready to Ship for what is actually available today.

Eating whole, first — the historical record rates their quality as excellent and they were a fancy-trade dessert fruit for three centuries. Then: cheese boards, garnishes, roasting whole, poaching whole, cider, and decoration.

They are a poor choice for anything that needs volume of peeled flesh. Twenty-five apples per pie is a real obstacle.

Start with a sturdy wire or grapevine frame and a base of evergreens — fir, boxwood, magnolia. Wire each apple by wrapping floral wire tightly around the stem rather than pushing it through the flesh, which is what makes them rot.

Work the apples in clusters of three rather than spacing them evenly; it reads better. Allow about a dozen for an 18-inch wreath, or twenty-plus for a dense Della Robbia arrangement, and keep the finished wreath somewhere cool.

A style of fruit-and-evergreen decoration named after the della Robbia family of Renaissance Florentine sculptors, whose glazed terracotta reliefs were framed in garlands of fruit, pine cones and foliage.

The Colonial Williamsburg version made it an American Christmas staple, and small whole apples are its backbone. Lady apples are the traditional choice because they are the right size and hold their gloss.

Yes, and it is one of the best things to do with them. Core them or not, toss with a little butter and a pinch of salt, and roast at 400 °F for 15 to 20 minutes until they just split.

Put them around a pork loin, a duck or sausages for the last twenty minutes of cooking. Whole small apples are the classic garnish for roast meat, and a full-sized apple will not do it.

Beautifully, and whole. Simmer them gently in cider, white wine or a light syrup with a strip of lemon peel and a cinnamon stick for 12 to 18 minutes, until a skewer goes in with slight resistance.

Leave the stem on. A poached whole apple with its stem still attached is a dessert that looks like far more work than it was.

The flavour is fine; the arithmetic is against you. A 9-inch pie wants two and a half to three pounds of apples, which is twenty to twenty-five Ladies to core and slice.

Most people use them whole in a tart instead, or put a handful into a pie built mostly from a larger variety. If you want a dedicated pie apple, use Northern Spy or Rome.

They make excellent sauce and it comes out faintly pink from the skins — but you have to core a great many of them first.

If you have a food mill, cook them whole and halved with a splash of water and mill the lot. That removes the coring problem entirely and is the only sensible way to make sauce from an apple this size.

You can, though it takes a lot of them — they are tiny, and you need six to ten to the pound.

The juice is sweet and very perfumed, which makes Lady a lovely aromatic note in a blend rather than a cider on its own.

Among the best. Halved or quartered, the white flesh against the red rim looks deliberate, and the scale suits a board where a wedge of a full-sized apple looks clumsy.

Sweet and aromatic works with sharp cheddar, blue cheese and aged alpine cheeses, and the size means a guest can take a whole half.

Constantly, and this is one reason specialist produce houses still carry them. Whole with the stem on beside a roast, halved on a plate, or as the apple in a cocktail garnish.

They also candy well, and a small whole candied apple is far more manageable than a full-sized one.

For eating out of hand, no — most people eat them like a plum and leave the core, or eat the lot. For cooking, it depends on the method.

Whole-roasting and poaching work uncored. For sauce, cook them whole and use a food mill. It is only pie and tart work that really requires coring each one, which is why so few people bake with them.

Yes, and whole slices from a small apple make attractive rings — the natural diameter is about right for a garland or a garnish.

Slice crosswise about an eighth of an inch thick, skin on, and dry at 135 °F for six to eight hours. Dried apple rings on a string are another old Christmas decoration, and these are the right size for it.

Very, and they solve the main problem with caramel apples, which is that a full-sized one is too much for anybody. A Lady apple on a short stick is a single serving.

Chill and dry the skin thoroughly first or the caramel slides off. The glossy skin that makes them handsome also makes them slippery.

Jelly is a good use, because you do not core for jelly — cook the fruit whole with water, strain through a jelly bag overnight, and boil the juice with sugar. The high skin-to-flesh ratio actually helps, since skins carry pectin.

Apple butter is harder work for the same coring reason. Use a food mill if you want to attempt it.

The flavour bakes well and the flesh holds its shape — the obstacle is volume. Anything that needs peeled, cored, sliced apple in quantity means processing twenty-five fruit instead of six.

Where they excel is baking that uses them whole: roasted around a joint, poached, baked stuffed, or arranged whole in a tart. For a conventional pie or crumble, use Northern Spy or Rome and keep the Ladies for the table.

Very. Quartered or halved rather than diced, they give you a piece of apple with skin on two sides and a neat white face — which looks far better in a salad than a cube cut from a big apple.

Sweet and aromatic works with bitter leaves, blue cheese, walnuts and a sharp vinaigrette. Cut them close to serving or dress them straight away, since they brown at a normal rate.

A medium Lady — about 58 grams — is roughly 30 to 35 calories. A small one is nearer 20 to 25; a large one runs 40 to 45.

The figure to work from is 52 calories per 100 grams, from USDA, for a raw apple with the skin on. Size matters more than usual here. A Lady apple is roughly a third the weight of a supermarket apple, so a “medium apple” panel overstates one by about three times.

A large Lady of about 80 grams comes to roughly 40 to 45 calories.

Across the sizes we pack: small (~40 g) about 21, medium (~58 g) about 30, large (~80 g) about 42. Multiply the weight in grams by 0.52 for a close estimate at any size.

A small Lady of about 40 grams is roughly 20 to 25 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 Lady 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 58 grams that is roughly 30 calories, 8 g carbohydrate and 1.4 g fiber. The full table by size is in the nutrition section above.

About 7 to 9 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, of which roughly 1.4 grams is fiber — so approximately 7 grams of net carbs.

Per 100 grams that is 13.81 grams. This is the generic raw-apple figure rather than a cultivar measurement, scaled to the actual weight of a Lady apple rather than to a standard medium apple.

Roughly 8 grams of total carbohydrate in a medium apple, with about 1.4 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 6 to 7 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.

Lady is mild and gently sweet with a clean, faintly floral finish — more delicate than a modern apple, which is exactly its charm.

About 1.4 grams in a medium apple with the skin on — 2.4 grams per 100 grams.

This is the generic raw-apple figure, scaled to a Lady apple’s actual weight. Peeling costs you roughly a third of it.

Very little of either: about 0.2 grams of protein and 0.1 grams of fat in a medium apple, and virtually no sodium.

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

About 107 mg per 100 grams, so roughly 62 mg in a medium apple.

That is typical for an apple.

About 2.7 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.

Lady skin is thin, smooth and glossy, and on a fruit this small there is proportionally a great deal of it. Nobody peels a Lady apple; it would be most of the fruit. 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.

This is the question people get wrong most often. A Lady apple is under two inches across and weighs about 40 to 80 grams, so expect six to ten to the pound rather than three. A 9-inch pie takes roughly twenty to twenty-five of them.

Everything except one word. Pink Lady is a trademark for Cripps Pink, bred in Western Australia in 1973 from Golden Delicious and Lady Williams, full-sized, firm, sweet-tart, and sold in every supermarket on earth.

The Lady apple is a French heirloom documented in 1628, under two inches across, sweet and aromatic, and sold almost nowhere. Three and a half centuries and 10,000 miles apart.

Size-wise they overlap, and a Lady apple technically falls inside the usual under-two-inches definition of a crab. The difference is what they are for.

Crabapples are generally astringent and grown for jelly, pollination or ornament. Lady is a full dessert cultivar bred and selected for eating — sweet, aromatic and rated excellent in quality. A crab that good would not be called a crab.

Similar direction, wildly different scale. Gala is sweet, mild, aromatic and full-sized — and is one of the most-grown apples in the world.

Lady is sweeter in impression because of the skin-to-flesh ratio, more aromatic, keeps far longer, and gives you eight fruit to the pound instead of three. If you like Gala and want something with more character in a smaller package, this is it.

Honeycrisp is a 1991 Minnesota variety bred for explosive texture, and it is a big, juicy, crunchy apple. Lady is a 1628 French heirloom the size of a golf ball, bred for nothing in particular because nobody was breeding apples in 1628.

Honeycrisp wins on texture. Lady wins on aroma, keeping and the fact that you can put it on a wreath.

Two heirlooms that both lost the same commercial argument for different reasons. Golden Russet was pushed out for being brown and rough; Lady was pushed out for being small.

Lady is light, sweet and perfumed, a dessert and decorating apple.

Winesap is the other great old American market apple — spicy, winey, tart, firm and a long keeper. Both were commercially important in the nineteenth century and both are now specialist fruit.

Winesap is the more serious apple to eat and the better cider apple. Lady is sweeter, far smaller, and the one that ends up on the table at Christmas.

Its own sisters — Api Noir, Api Etoile and Api Gros — and after those, honestly, nothing very close. The combination of that size with that sweetness and that keeping quality is unusual.

For small sweet apples at a more findable scale, Gala at its smallest grades comes nearest. It is not the same thing.

For eating by the bagful, for a child’s lunchbox, for a cheese board, for a roast, or for anything decorative — yes, and nothing substitutes.

For a week of ordinary eating apples or for baking, no. Buy a full-sized variety and use the Ladies for what only they can do.

Because of the number of individual fruit in a pound. Every apple has to be picked by hand, graded and packed, and there are three times as many of them per pound as in any other variety.

Add a small planted acreage, a short picking window and almost no commercial scale, and the price follows. You are paying for labour per fruit, not for scarcity theatre.

They are now, and they were not always. In 1905 they were a mainstream fancy-trade fruit in the New York market, and in the 1840s they were New York’s premium apple export to London.

What moved them into the specialty category was not quality but the standardisation of produce grading around a single fruit size.

Usually, yes. When you see small whole glossy red apples wired into a wreath or a Della Robbia garland, Lady apples are the traditional choice and very often the actual fruit.

Some decorators substitute crabapples or small Galas. Lady holds its gloss longer and has the neat symmetrical shape the style wants.

Three unrelated apples. Lady is the 1628 French heirloom on this page. Lady Alice is a modern Washington chance seedling, full-sized, striped and sweet-tart. Lady Williams is an Australian variety and a parent of Pink Lady.

Four apples with “Lady” in the name, on three continents, across four centuries, none of them related to the others.

Here, shipped from the farm when the crop is in, and otherwise from specialist produce houses, heritage orchards and farm stands — mostly in November and December.

They are not a supermarket item. See Ready to Ship for what is leaving the farm today, and order early if you want them for Christmas.

Packed so the fruit cannot shift. Small, firm, thick-skinned apples travel unusually well — New York growers were shipping them to London under sail in the 1840s.

Full details on packing, transit times and destinations are on our shipping information page. Refrigerate the box on arrival.

Yes. Case and bulk quantities are on our bulk and case apples page — and bulk is how the decorating trade buys them.

Be careful with the arithmetic. A bushel runs about 40 to 42 pounds, which at six to ten apples per pound is somewhere between 250 and 400 individual Lady apples. That is a great many more fruit than a bushel of anything else.

Roughly 30 to 50, depending on the size running that season. It looks like a lot of apples in the box, because it is.

Weight is the honest measure for any apple, but with this variety the count surprises people in a good way.

Per pound, more than a commodity apple. Per apple, they are among the cheapest fruit we sell, because there are six to ten of them in a pound.

Which figure matters depends on what you are doing. For a bowl on a table or a wreath, think per apple. For baking, think per pound, and then buy something else.

Yes. It is an heirloom with no plant patent, so anyone may propagate it, and heritage fruit nurseries carry it — ask for Lady, Api or Pomme d’Api.

It is a reasonable garden tree and an excellent one for anybody who wants a conversation piece. We sell fruit, not trees.

The fruit is tiny; the tree is not. Rootstock decides, as with any apple — 8 to 12 feet on a dwarfing stock, 12 to 18 on semi-dwarf, and 20 feet or more on standard.

Do not expect a miniature tree because you are getting miniature apples. The two are unrelated.

Any compatible apple or flowering crabapple blooming at the same time. Lady blooms mid-season, so Cortland, Liberty, Gala or Honeycrisp will all serve.

Avoid relying on a triploid such as Mutsu or Jonagold, whose pollen is sterile.

The usual eastern insects — codling moth, plum curculio, apple maggot — plus one that is specific to small-fruited varieties: the apple-seed chalcid.

That is a tiny wasp which lays eggs inside apple seeds. In a full-sized apple the depth of flesh physically blocks its ovipositor; in a fruit this small it does not. It is a genuine and unusual problem for the variety.

It bears a great many fruit, which is not quite the same as a heavy crop by weight. Counting apples it looks enormously productive; weighing them it is ordinary.

That is the trade a small-fruited variety makes, and it is exactly why commercial growers stopped planting it.

Less usefully than most varieties. Thinning is normally done to increase fruit size, and with this apple there is no size to gain — a well-thinned Lady is still a Lady.

Thin lightly to keep the tree cropping annually and to remove damaged fruit, and otherwise leave it be.

Two to four years on a dwarfing rootstock, three to five on semi-dwarf, and five to eight on standard — the same as any apple. Rootstock is what governs it.

An heirloom on a standard rootstock is a long wait. If you want fruit soon, buy it on a dwarfing stock.

On a dwarfing rootstock, yes, and there is a particular argument for it: a small tree that produces hundreds of small apples gives you a usable crop you can actually get through, rather than three bushels of fruit you cannot eat.

Add four hundred years of history and a tree that looks like a Christmas decoration in November, and it earns its space.

Ask us. We grow them, pick them and ship them, and this is a variety with more misinformation attached to it than almost any other — we would rather answer a question than have you sort the legends out yourself.

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.