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Apple Butter
Pare, quarter, and core one peck of sour apples and about two quarts of sweet apples.
Add cider to the apples, cover and let cook, stirring occasionally, at first, and afterwards constantly with a utensil designed for the purpose. Cook and stir until the apples are reduced to a consistency like that of marmalade. When the cooking is nearly completed, add sugar to equal half the weight of the apples before cooking, also cinnamon or such spice as desired. Water or boiled cider may take the place of the fresh cider.
Apple Butter No. 2 Prepare and cook apples as for sauce, then press through a sieve. Return to the fire and add as much apple jelly as desired and cinnamon bark for spice; let cook until thick; remove the cinnamon and store as jelly or in cans. Honey may replace the sugar.
An old-style open-kettle apple butter: no pectin, no thermometer, just apples and cider cooked down for hours. The quantities are large by modern standards, and the whole thing hinges on stirring.
- A peck of applesA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 10-12 lb of apples, about 30 medium fruit. With the two quarts of sweet apples added you are starting with something near 14 lb of fruit and finishing with perhaps 4-5 quarts of butter. Halve or quarter the recipe unless you own a very large pot.
- Sour and sweet apples"Sour" means a tart cooking apple such as Granny Smith, Bramley or a firm russet; the sweet apples soften the acidity and add body. Any mix of firm tart apples with a couple of sweeter ones works; avoid apples that collapse into water.
- How much ciderThe recipe never says. Add enough to come a third of the way up the fruit, roughly 2-3 cups for a full peck, and add more only if the pan threatens to catch before the apples break down.
- The sugar is by weight of raw fruitHalf the weight of the apples before cooking means about 5-6 lb of sugar for a peck of sour apples, nearer 7 lb if you count the two quarts of sweet apples as well. That is an old-style sweetness level and also the preservative. Modern apple butters typically use a quarter of that or less; reducing it gives a fresher-tasting butter that must be refrigerated or properly canned rather than kept on a shelf.
- Stirring is the whole recipeOnce the fruit has broken down the mass catches very quickly if left alone, and a scorched batch is hard to salvage. The "utensil designed for the purpose" was a long-handled wooden paddle or stirrer, sometimes with a perforated blade. A flat-ended wooden spatula that reaches the pan corners is the modern equivalent. Add the sugar only near the end, as the original says, because sugar makes it stick far more readily.
- Time and the doneness testExpect 3-5 hours on the stove for a large batch. It is done when a spoonful on a cold plate holds its shape with no ring of liquid weeping out at the edge, and when a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that closes slowly.
- SpiceCinnamon bark, as in the second version, is easier to remove and gives a cleaner flavour than ground cinnamon, which can turn the butter gritty and muddy in colour. Start with two or three sticks per gallon of pulp and taste.
- "Store as jelly or in cans"At the time that meant pouring hot into glasses and sealing with paraffin wax, which is no longer considered safe storage. Apple butter is high-acid and is still water-bath canned today, but follow a current tested processing time for your jar size rather than the book's silence, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- The second versionNo. 2 is a shortcut: sieved applesauce enriched with apple jelly for set and gloss. Honey in place of sugar will darken the butter and carry its own flavour, so use a mild one.
Apple butter belongs to the cider-making autumn of the eastern United States, and is strongly associated with Pennsylvania German households, where the German tradition of Latwerg — it kept without much sugar — took root, with cider as the American adaptation. It was cooked communally in a copper kettle over an outdoor fire, sometimes for a whole day, with neighbours taking turns at the long-handled stirrer; the perforated paddle mentioned here as "a utensil designed for the purpose" was a familiar sight on such farms. The point of the dish was thrift: windfall and second-grade apples, together with cider that would otherwise turn, were reduced to a spread that lasted the winter. Its appearance in a preserving manual of this period may suggest the shift of that outdoor communal labour indoors to the kitchen range and the glass canning jar, and the book also offers a quicker second version built on sieved sauce and ready-made jelly.