I'd Avoided Apples My Whole Life. At the Foot of Mount Sinai, I Realized Why

By Rita Dove

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” How often had I heard those words as a child, usually after school when I was begging for a Popsicle? Not that I had anything against fresh fruit, I just preferred nearly any other kind—cherries, peaches, plums. Even though I admired the rich crimson contours of a Red Delicious, the resounding crack! of that first bite, something was off. After eating one I’d feel slightly out of sorts, a vague unease.

That didn’t stop me from devouring one of my mother’s signature desserts: Apple Brown Betty. In our family kitchen in Akron, Ohio, I was permitted to watch but not touch since the household budget was tight and ingredients were too precious to allow for mistakes. In this laboratory of hissing pressure cookers and sizzling iron skillets, my mother was a master of practical chemistry, transforming the garden’s yield of squash and string beans into steaming casseroles, preserving the overabundant tomatoes in mason jars. When it came to desserts, she turned from science to art, whisking and dipping and sprinkling—flamboyant meringues tested with a finger flick, sugared tart crusts tapped lightly before sliding, perfectly crimped, into the oven. My mother’s Apple Brown Betty was a bravura performance. Golden crescents zinging with cinnamon and nutmeg, topping crisped to a nutty gold. Cooking the apples seemed to lessen my apple aversion somewhat, but Mom knew it was my least-favorite fruit, so she looked for substitutes. Her experimental varieties—crumbles with cherry, plum, nectarine—were even more phenomenal.

When, at 18, I went off to college and became a card-carrying adult and Mortar Board intellectual, I thought I had left all that folk wisdom behind—shut that window or you’ll catch your death of cold; step on a crack, break your mother’s back—but those old adages die hard. Even now I will toss a pinch of spilled salt over my left shoulder. Why should a childhood axiom extolling the nutritional value of apples have been any different? They had to be good for you, right?

Which may explain why, one hot summer day less than a decade after I graduated, I found myself rumbling through the Sinai Peninsula on a rough-riding desert tour bus void of air conditioning, feeling virtuous as I munched through my second greenish-yellow apple.

It was 1979, the last months before the Camp David Accords facilitated Israel’s return of the Sinai back to Egypt, and we were trekking to the site of Moses’s vision of the Ten Commandments. Every hour our tour guide took a battered cardboard box from the front seat and paraded it down the aisle like a bass drum in a marching band, urging those dubious fruits upon us. “Are you drinking enough? This heat will suck you dry. Drink. Eat that apple. Stay hydrated.” I took another bite, surprised to be savoring the tart juice. Why had I shunned this heavenly fruit?

I should have known.

Except for me and my husband, Fred—an African American poet and a German novelist—our bus was full of American Jews, but no one questioned what we were doing in the mix. We refilled our canteens, reprised songs from Fiddler on the Roof. The plan: Set up camp and bed down at the base of Mount Sinai near an Israeli military post, within sight of St. Catherine’s, the oldest continuously occupied monastery since the sixth century; get up at 2 a.m. for the predawn hike; welcome sunrise at the summit. By 9 p.m. we had crawled into our sleeping bags. The ground was hard, but no one complained: There were just a few hours left to shore up energy for the climb.

I closed my eyes, felt myself falling past the point of sleep into a pit of silence, deeper and deeper. Then a tug, a yank— and I broke surface into a softer dark, flickering with stars. Above me a stranger’s head, dangling like a frightened moon. Faint murmurings, indistinct; some poor soul moaning. Oh, God, was that my voice?

Fred’s familiar face thrust into the picture. “I couldn’t wake you up!” he yelled. “You didn’t move, so I slapped you!”

Slowly my surroundings came into focus. Darkness, punctuated by camping lanterns. A desert night, cool on my cheeks, the rest of me sweltering in the sleeping bag. Nearby, a few men conferred urgently while the other bus passengers held a nervous distance. I tried but despite Fred’s help failed to sit up as the men approached, introducing themselves as physicians and pharmacists.

“You’re severely allergic to something,” one of the doctors said, “and require immediate treatment. The army base commander has offered to helicopter you to the hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh.”

“Helicopter?” I rasped. The very word pitched me back into free fall. I was terrified of flying on small aircraft; a helicopter ride might put me under for good.

“However,” a pharmacist interjected, “perhaps we can concoct an antidote to tide you over. Do you feel up for some gefilte fish and canned corn?”

Gefilte fish and corn: not exactly my daily fare, but nothing had ever sounded more delicious. Two cans from the stockpile in the bus were brought over and I scarfed them down, gaining strength with every forkful. Huffing, the doctors shook their heads, but the pharmacists cheered when I cautiously sat up. “You’ll be fine, but if you don’t nail the source of your allergic reaction, the next time might be worse,” he admonished, then joined the ascent.

Fred and I stayed behind with a few others who had elected not to climb. As the sky brightened, we reviewed my past fainting episodes. In the three years we’d been together, there’d been two: first while I was still a student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after sampling a classmate’s apple-walnut bread; then again when Fred was teaching at Oberlin College, at a faculty Halloween party featuring—what else?—candy apples. Suddenly my childhood discomforts made sense, why my mother’s Brown Betty had elicited the most delight whenever she replaced apples for peaches or plums or cherries (my favorite) plucked from our scraggly backyard tree. As I got older my intolerance for apples must have also grown, until even baked goods proved impossible to stomach. During that long, hot day on the desert bus, I’d been so anxious to keep the doctor away that I ate one apple after another—and in the end managed to summon a fleet of medical professionals.

There it was: clear evidence of what my body had been trying to warn me of all along. But like Old Testament Eve, I’d ignored the portents until they caught up with me here at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Had I been courting original sin by eating apples? Nonsense, I thought, it’s just a coincidence—and decided then and there to abandon the biblical analogy for the more hopeful dread of the Brothers Grimm. I’d call my mystery allergy the Snow White Syndrome; to my knowledge, that fairy-tale princess and I are the only two whose reaction to raw apples is to black out.

To this day I don’t know why the pharmacists’ corn-and-fish antidote worked. It goes against all reason: processed seafood, a high-fiber vegetable that can trigger anaphylaxis. An example of the proverbial fighting fire with fire, perhaps? The pharmacists merely smiled; they weren’t giving away their secrets. Specialists back in the US were equally perplexed and suggested a battery of intrusive allergy tests, which I declined. Instead, I filled the prescription for an EpiPen and reconfigured my canned food inventory, just in case. As the proverb goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Luckily, there are plenty of fruits around to fill the void. Although the Apple Brown Betty’s roots go back to colonial America, its first mention in print wasn’t until 1864 in The Yale Literary Magazine, where the b in Betty was capitalized but not the b in brown, leading to some speculation that brown refers not to the dessert but the skin color of the recipe’s creator, a servant, possibly enslaved. I remember my mother’s culinary improvisations—leftovers folded into casseroles; no-name desserts yummier than many a five-star confection; how, in the tradition of making do, she’d sometimes add oats to the fruit medley, which technically resulted in a crisp or crumble—but she called them all Brown Bettys. I like to think it harkens back to that first Betty who, in need of a quick dessert, slapped together a miracle from the ingredients at hand.

So here, cobbled together from memory and with deep love, is my mom’s never-the-same-twice recipe for [insert your favorite fruit here] Brown Betty. I’ll leave it to you to omit whatever ingredients might send you into a fainting spell.

Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former US Poet Laureate. Her most recent book, Playlist for the Apocalypse, is now out in paperback.