Honeycrisp is recent- 1991. Red Delicious was a great stride forward at that time. Before that the best apple was the Granny Smith, and other like Fameuse (Snow Apple), Golden Russet , etc. The beauty of the Red Delicious was that it tasted better than many varieties- most were used for cooking and cider only, not eating- and the fact it was good for long storage, thus people outside Washington, etc could find decent apples all year 'round.
Mind you I agree, Honeycrisp is great!
Try mixing it with 7-Up or Sprite. That’s how I always drink it.
I always thought beets tasted like dirt until I tried them in a salad Russians call seledka pod shuboi (“herring under a fur coat”). I also had them mixed with rice in Poland and developed a taste for them. I like their kind of sweetness, and can’t imagine making borscht without them.
I don’t get the dislike for roasted chestnuts. I first had them from a street vendor on a cold, rainy night in England. They were charred, toasted, and wonderfully sweet. They had to be dug out of the embers with a little scoop before they were put into the bag. They tasted like a potato baked in a campfire, which was how they should. The first Europeans who tried potatoes in the New World said they tasted like chestnuts.
Never tried that, but good Borscht is great, especially with a beef base.
And sour cream makes everything better!
If you think a baked potato tastes wonderfully sweet, then we have very different taste buds.
Have you ever had one baked in a campfire instead of an oven? The taste needs no embellishing.
On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses? 
Seriously, hot roasted chestnuts are pretty good. They used to be freely available in Toronto, from snack carts; but they don’t seem to be available here in western Canada.
The secret to a baked potato is finely-ground white pepper. Butter, salt, white pepper, sour cream, bacon bits and chives, in that order, and you have a potato that might as well be a meal. I’ve certainly eaten one as a meal. White pepper is a subtle heat, and gives the potato a kick that black pepper doesn’t.
Pro Tip: Coat the potato in olive oil, and then hit it with coarsely-ground sea salt or Kosher salt. Gives the skin a nice texture.
That’s actually not true at all; I know a lot of the early apple varieties in the US were cider or cooking types, but that isn’t because that was all there was, it was what was picked to plant.
There’s been a huge variety of eating apples for centuries in the UK and Europe. There even used to be a whole class of apples selected for easy drying, the ‘beefing’ apples, as well as ones with unusual flavour profiles, especially popular before it was easy to get exotic fruit [1]. There were ones that fruit early, last only a few weeks and need eating fresh, and storage varieties that initially have high acid levels which act as a preservative, the acids gradually break down, so they need storing for months before they’re tasty raw, but they can last for ages. You could easily have apples from late summer through to late spring, even before modern refrigeration, it just needed a few different types.
The thing is, as well as the complexity of needing a range of different trees that need treating differently, which is fine on a small scale but gets complicated at supermarket levels, a lot of the tasty varieties didn’t look so good. Russets, for example, are really sweet and full of flavour, but they have big brown rough patches on them, and wrinkle on storage. They still taste fine wrinkly, but can look awful. My great-grandparents had loads of these, and a huge apple section in the larder at the farm to store them in.
Some of these varieties have been lost, but a lot are still available from specialist growers or in heritage orchards, so I have tried quite a few and I grow some as well. A lot of them really do taste way better than any of the apples you can readily find in the shops. The reason red delicious and golden delicious and a small handful of other varieties became so widespread was because they look great, and stay looking good for ages, and that’s what supermarkets want, even if they maybe taste of styrofoam after a while.
In the spirit of the thread, taking a big bite of an exciting heritage apple that, as it turns out, really needs storage for 3 months to become edible raw has happened once or twice.
shoutout to Pitmaston Pineapple ↩︎
Hot chestnuts from a street cart on a cold winter day in Munich is gods own food.
Having had hot chestnuts from a street cart on a cold winter day in Munich, I can surmise that god likes his food mealy.
With a bland but still unpleasant taste.
This Chestnut hate must be akin to Cilantro hate. I love Chestnuts-they are nutty and sweet and warm. How can you not like that?
They are bland and mealy 
. Though a half-second online indicates that might be more pronounced in older or overcooked chestnuts. So maybe I’ve just had bad luck. Then again ‘starchy’ and ‘baked potato-like’ seems to be a common descriptor of them generally. So I dunno - if I got a sweeter one, I might still dislike the texture. I like baked potatoes but that is generally not what I’m looking for in a nut.
Lately, my parents have been getting Galil chestnuts from Costco. They come in a sealed bag and are ready to eat, having already been roasted and shelled. They’re supposed to be high quality, so they shouldn’t be bland or mealy. And still I don’t like them.
Apples in colonial America were mostly grown for Cider. We are talking American varieties here, mostly?
Granny Smith apples were bred in Australia, only 4 years before Red Delicious, and weren’t available in the US until years after.
Early US settlers grew a lot of varieties- there’s several hundred known- and brought plenty of European plants over. For many settlers though, it was often easier (and much cheaper) to get seed-grown plants rather than grafted, and they are rarely edible raw, though fine for cider and often OK for cooking.
Nope. I have nothing against how chestnuts taste. I can’t stand their texture. Mealy.
It’s well understood why some people dislike cilantro; that a gene causes it to taste soapy for some people. I don’t think it’s as simple for chestnuts.
Yeah, the taste wasn’t unpleasant really, but it was starchy and bland. I didn’t get sweet or nutty out of it at all. And the texture was mealy; it was nice and firm at first, but as I chewed, it just seemed to break into smaller and smaller particles, never really becoming creamy like say… a pecan.
I suspect it’s a Turkish Delight kind of situation where maybe back in 1881, they were considered delicious, but times and tastes have changed.