''Crisp and refreshing'' Pen Vogler, The Spectator Sin, cider and apple crumblethe 10,000-year story of the worlds most tempting fruit. The Apple: A Delicious History takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, from the apples prehistoric beginnings in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan to the explosion of commercial apple-growing in twenty-first-century ChinaZigzagging across the centuries and straddling the globe, Sally Coulthard explores how the apple travelled along the Silk Road from Central Asia to Europe, appearing as an erotically charged symbol in Greek myth and poetry and even featuring in the shopping list of a senior Roman officer stationed on Hadrians Wall. She samples the cider that flowed from the emperor. Charlemagnes orchards in the early Middle Ages, and relishes the crispness of the yellow sweeting, the first new apple variety to be cultivated in seventeenth-century America. And she discovers why, despite the existence of more than 7500 varieties of appl