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Apple Butter
Boil one barrel of new cider down half, peel and core three bushels of good cooking apples; when the cider has boiled to half the quantity, add the apples, and when soft, stir constantly for from eight to ten hours. If done it will adhere to an inverted plate. Put away in stone jars (not earthen ware), covering first with writing-paper cut to fit the jar, and press down closely upon the apple butter; cover the whole with thick brown paper snugly tied down. Miss Sarah Thomson, Delaware.
This is a barn-yard batch — a full barrel of cider and three bushels of apples — written for a day's work over an outdoor fire with two or three people taking turns at the paddle. The proportions scale down cleanly; the storage instructions do not.
- The scale, in modern numbersA barrel is reckoned at 31.5 gallons, boiled down to about 16; a bushel of apples runs 42-48 lb, so three bushels is something like 130-145 lb before peeling and coring. That works out to roughly one gallon of unreduced cider per four pounds of apples, which is the ratio to keep if you cook a gallon or two at home.
- "New cider" is sweet ciderIt means fresh-pressed, unfermented juice, not the alcoholic drink sold as cider today. Use unsweetened, preferably unfiltered apple cider; the recipe adds no sugar at all, relying on the cider boiling down to concentrate its own.
- Apples that break down"Good cooking apples" in a household of this period would have meant tart varieties that collapse when cooked; Rambo and Maiden Blush were common then. Modern equivalents are McIntosh, Cortland, Gravenstein or Jonathan. Firm keepers like Fuji stay in lumps.
- Stirring is not optionalEight to ten hours of constant stirring is the whole technique: apple butter scorches the instant it touches dry metal, and burnt sugar taints the entire batch. A heavy-bottomed pot, a wide flat-bladed paddle that reaches the corners, and the lowest possible heat. Left alone in a slow cooker or a 250F oven it needs stirring only occasionally, but it also darkens less.
- The inverted-plate testThe recipe's test is that the butter adheres to an inverted plate; in practice a spoonful put on a plate and turned over should cling without sliding or weeping a ring of liquid. It works on the same principle as the cold-plate test for jam set, and it is more reliable than any clock.
- Stone, not earthenwareThe distinction was a real one. Salt-glazed stoneware was fired hot enough to be non-porous; cheap lead-glazed earthenware leached lead into acidic contents. It is good advice for anyone still using antique crocks — do not store vinegary or fruit preserves in unidentified old glazed pottery.
- Do not use the paper coveringWriting paper pressed to the surface and brown paper tied over the top is not a seal; it keeps dust off and lets the top skin dry into a crust. It relies on the crock living in a cold cellar and on somebody scraping mold off. Ladle the finished butter into hot jars and process it as a current tested water-bath recipe directs, or simply refrigerate it and eat it within a few weeks.
- YieldAt full scale this made well over a hundred pounds — a winter's supply for a large household. A gallon of cider with four pounds of apples gives roughly three pints.
Apple butter belongs to the cider-mill economy of the eastern and midwestern United States, where a farm pressed far more juice in October than it could drink or barrel, and boiling it down was the cheapest way to keep the harvest. The long reduction is what makes it "butter": no dairy is involved, only fruit cooked until it is thick enough to spread, a naming convention it shares with pear butter and the older English fruit cheeses. The all-day stir was social work, and apple-butter boilings are widely described as a neighborhood or church gathering in Pennsylvania German and Ohio Valley communities, with the copper kettle set over a fire in the yard. The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, collected recipes under the names of the women who contributed them, and Miss Sarah Thomson's barrel-and-bushels version reflects a household still working at harvest scale rather than by the pint.