Every apple has a story, and the third- and fourth-generation family growers in the heart of the state’s apple country can tell you lots of them. Take, for example, the original Delicious apple: “It was neither red nor yellow — it was striped,” says Tom Clark, the third generation of his family to own and operate Clarkdale Orchard in Deerfield. He adds that the flesh of Cortlands — which, like Empires, Jona Golds, and several other popular eating varieties, were born of 20th-century science at Cornell University’s School of Agriculture — doesn’t turn brown right away after it’s exposed to the air, making it popular in Waldorf salads. And the University of Minnesota has developed such cold-hardy apples as the Honeycrisp, which ripen late in the season.