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Apple Butter, American
Fill a preserving-pan with apples peeled, quartered, and cored. Add a slight flavouring of cloves, allspice, and cinnamon. Cover with good cider, and boil slowly, stirring from time to time with a wooden spoon, until the whole becomes a dark brown jam, with only juice sufficient to keep it soft and buttery. Remove it from the fire, and place in well-covered jars, and in a few weeks it will be ready for use. It makes an excellent substitute for butter, and is very wholesome for children. Time to prepare, five or six hours. Probable cost per pint, 10d.
A sugarless fruit butter that relies entirely on long reduction to concentrate the apples' own sweetness. The original assumes an open fire, a copper preserving-pan and a cook passing through the kitchen every few minutes.
- The hinge: it will scorchOnce the mass thickens past jam stage there is almost no free liquid to protect the bottom of the pan, and a single scorched layer flavours the whole batch. Use the heaviest pan you own, keep the heat very low for the last hour, and scrape the base — not just the surface — each time you stir.
- Oven instead of stovetopThe full five to six hours of stirring can be cut to an unattended stretch in a 300F oven in an uncovered roasting pan, or a slow cooker with the lid propped ajar. Both reduce by evaporation without the direct bottom heat that causes catching.
- QuantitiesVictorian preserving-pans came in a range of sizes, the larger domestic ones holding several quarts. Working at domestic scale, about 5 lb of peeled and cored apples with cider enough to cover them reduces to roughly 2 to 3 pints of finished butter.
- The ciderIn the American original, "good cider" would most likely mean unfiltered sweet cider or fresh-pressed apple juice; a British reader of the period would as likely have reached for the fermented drink. Either will work, but the alcoholic kind gives a sharper, drier result.
- Spicing"A slight flavouring" is a fraction of what modern apple butter recipes call for. Start with about half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and allspice and a quarter teaspoon of cloves per 5 lb of fruit, and add more at the end — the flavours concentrate as the butter reduces.
- ApplesSofter cooking varieties break down fastest: Bramley, McIntosh, Cortland, or a mixture. Firm eating apples such as Granny Smith will hold their shape stubbornly and need longer, or a pass through a food mill.
- DonenessIt is ready when a spoonful dropped on a cold plate holds its shape and weeps no watery ring at the edge. The colour should be genuinely dark, closer to mahogany than to apple sauce.
- Storage"Well-covered jars" left to stand a few weeks reflects a period reliance on cool cellars and a thick surface skin rather than on a seal we would count on today. Apple butter is high in acid, but with no added sugar it keeps poorly: refrigerate it, freeze it, or process filled half-pint jars in a boiling water bath according to a current canning guide.
- CostTenpence a pint is cheap — a reminder that the recipe is offered as an economy, a spread for bread when butter was dear.
Apple butter is associated above all with the Pennsylvania Germans, whose forebears came largely from the Rhineland and the Palatinate, where Apfelkraut and similar fruit butters were boiled down in copper kettles; in America it kept its association with the autumn cider press and the communal stirring party well into the twentieth century. Cassell's labels it "American", and British cooks more usually preserved apples as jelly or cheese with substantial added sugar; this particular butter uses none, relying on hours of evaporation to drive off water and concentrate the fruit's own sugars. The framing as a butter substitute is the practical heart of it — in households where dairy butter was a measured luxury, a spread that cost tenpence the pint and kept in the cellar through the winter earned its place on the table.