Many years ago, when supermarkets celebrated fall with multiple apple varieties, there was small apples, the size of crab apples, that were eating apples. There doesn’t seem to be a easily Goggled source for searching apples by variety, so I’m hoping this isn’t too obscure for the SDMB. What I’m looking for is an eating apple the size of a Seckel pear. Something suitable for making a candy apple a toddler would like. So small for little hands, and not sour like a crab apple. I’m hoping, once I get some names and pictures, I’ll recognize the apples I recall. Or maybe a new, more suitable, variety.
I find that when you buy the bags of apples, as opposed to the individual ones, they are smaller. I buy them for my kids for that very reason. But I will say that you should take a good look at them first because it seems the bags are more likely to have bruised apples.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apple_cultivars
or http://www.abundanceedinburgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/collage1.jpg
or http://www.newenglandapples.org/AppleVarieties-id-37.html
Well, I meant to say that I didn’t find anything online that let me type in characteristics and get varieties back. But searching for “small” on the Wikipedia page lead me to the conclusion that I’m looking for an apple with “pippen” in it’s name. Shame those seem to be UK varieties.
I don’t recall that they were labeled anything but red apples, but my local grocery store had a bin of ridiculously tiny apples in stock last weekend. I wondered who the target audience was.
I go the the famers markets and discount store. They have them there. Big chain grocery stores only want big apples.
Lady apples are small, sweet crab apples. They’re also kind of flattened.
The Lady Apple sounds familiar, that may be the apple I remember, but I may be remembering wrong. It seems that the mainstream supermarkets don’t do the “waterfall” of various apple varieties in the Autumn like they used to. I did go to a local apple farm last year and ask if they had small apples, since they had seckel pears, which are the size I have in mind. They said of the several varieties they have, they don’t have those – but they did mention a variety. I may have to go back, ask them again, get told “no” again, but this time, remember what variety they mention, and ask them if they know of an orchard that does grow that type of apple.