Spitzenburg apples.

This was, I keep reading, Thomas Jefferson's favorite apple, but the Monticello Explorer says:

'Esopus Spitzenburg' was one of Thomas Jefferson's two favorite Apple varieties, the other being 'Albemarle Pippin.' He planted thirty-two of these trees in the South Orchard at Monticello between 1807 and 1812. A.J. Downing, America's foremost nineteenth-century pomologist, described 'Esopus Spitzenburg' as "a handsome, truly delicious apple...unsurpassed as a dessert fruit...considered the first of apples." Today, Apple connoisseurs still consider this variety among the finest ever known. It bears handsome red apples, ripening in late autumn, with firm, juicy yellow flesh. The apples have a delicious, brisk, rich flavor that is unforgettable.

From a 2004 NYT article titled "Apples With Pedigrees Selling in Urban Edens":

The peculiarities of his varieties both vex and intrigue [Stephen Wood, the owner of Poverty Lane Orchards here, who planted 20 acres high-flavored "uncommon apples"]. His favorite — it was also Thomas Jefferson's — is Esopus Spitzenburg, bright red, with sky-high levels of sugar balanced by floral acidity. But its limbs grow chaotically, shading out the branches below, and it often produces "blind" wood, with no buds.

"It's the tree from hell," Mr. Wood said, waving his arms at a row of unruly Spitzes as if to say, "Behave!"

"From my perspective, however," he added, "the apples are sufficiently valuable that we put up with this nonsense."

We bought some in our "Urban Eden," the Dane County Farmers Market. Five dollars for a small bag. By the way, the word "apple" does not appear in Genesis. The first use of the word "apple" in the various English translations of the Bible that I am checking is in Deuteronomy, 32:10:

For the LORD's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.