Answer: Crab Apples

It would be easy to assume, given America’s love affair with the humble apple, that America was a land filled with varieties of apples from the very start. The truth of the matter, however, is that all the wonderful varieties of apples we find in the supermarket and fresh from our local orchards are all extremely cultivated varieties that bear little resemblance to the apples that were originally found in America.

Before Europeans introduced different varieties, and hundreds of years of cultivation provided the spread of apple types that we enjoy today, there was only one type of apple in America: the tiny, sour, and woody crab apple.