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Old-Fashioned Apple Butter
Boil ten gallons of sweet (apple) cider until reduced one half, then add, a few at a time, three pecks of pared, quartered, and cored cooking apples. Stir constantly with a wooden utensil made for the purpose, and let cook four or five hours. Add ten pounds of sugar and five ounces of ground cinnamon, and let cook again till quite thick, or until the mixture is like marmalade. The wooden utensil used in stirring breaks up the apple.
This is a full-scale apple butter boiling — the kind done outdoors in a copper kettle over a fire, not on a range. Everything below assumes you will divide it down.
- The scaleTen gallons of cider and three pecks of apples (roughly 30 to 36 lb) will finish as something like five gallons of apple butter. Dividing by eight gives a manageable batch: 1¼ gallons (20 cups) cider reduced by half, about 4 lb prepared apples, 1¼ lb (about 2¾ cups) sugar, and roughly 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon.
- Sweet cider"Sweet" here means unfermented — fresh-pressed apple cider, not hard cider. Cloudy unfiltered cider gives far more body and flavour than clear filtered apple juice, which will reduce to something thin and candy-like.
- The wooden utensilAn apple butter stirrer: a long-handled paddle with a perforated or slotted blade, worked constantly so the mash never rests on the metal. In a domestic pot, use the heaviest-bottomed vessel you own and a flat-edged wooden spatula that can scrape the corners.
- Scorching is the whole problemSugar plus reduced cider burns readily, and once it catches the entire batch tastes of it. Keep the heat low enough that the surface only plops rather than boils, and stir through to the bottom every few minutes. Cooking uncovered in a 300F oven, stirred every half hour, or in a slow cooker with the lid ajar, both remove most of the risk.
- Cooking applesThe recipe wants apples that break down — Bramley, Gravenstein, McIntosh, Cortland. Modern dessert apples bred to hold their shape (Honeycrisp, Fuji) are slower to collapse and may need longer cooking or mashing.
- SugarTen pounds to three pecks is modest by preserving standards, because the reduced cider is already sweet. Taste before adding all of it; modern dessert varieties tend to be sweeter than older cider and cooking apples.
- Judging "quite thick"Spoon a little onto a cold plate. When no ring of watery liquid seeps out at the edge, and a spoonful mounded on the plate holds its shape, it is done. Expect several hours beyond the first four or five.
- Keeping itThe original gives no sealing instructions. Apple butter is high in acid and takes a boiling-water bath well, but follow a current tested procedure for jar size and processing time rather than guessing; otherwise refrigerate and use within a few weeks, or freeze.
Apple butter belongs to the cider-making regions — Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the German-settled parts of the Midwest — where autumn produced far more apples and far more cider than a household could drink before it turned. Reducing cider and cooking fruit into it concentrated both to the point where sugar and acid did the preserving; the Pennsylvania Dutch name lattwaerg covers the same idea. A batch this size was not one family's afternoon work but a boiling, a social occasion with a copper kettle slung over a fire in the yard and stirrers taking turns at the paddle, since the mash cannot be left alone for even a few minutes. The purpose-made stirrer the recipe mentions so casually was a standard piece of rural equipment, long enough to keep the worker back from the heat.