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American Apple Butter
Fill a preserving-pan with apples peeled, quartered, and cored. Add a slight flavoring 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.
A long, slow reduction of apples in cider with no added sugar — the sweetness and the dark color come entirely from hours of evaporation and caramelization. The whole success of it rests on keeping the pan from scorching.
- Scorching is the hingeAs the mass thickens it will catch and burn on the bottom in seconds, and a scorched batch cannot be rescued. Keep the heat low, stir down to the pan floor every few minutes in the last hour or two, and switch to a flat wooden spatula once the mixture stops sloshing. Some modern cooks finish apple butter in a low oven, stirring every 20 minutes, for the same reason; the recipe itself keeps the pan on the fire throughout.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy, unlined pan — traditionally copper or brass. Use the widest heavy-bottomed pot you own; surface area is what drives off the water. A thin pan will burn the fruit long before it darkens.
- "Good cider"Sweet unfermented cider, not hard cider and not the clarified apple juice sold as "cider" in some regions. Fresh-pressed cloudy cider brings acidity and body, though the pectin comes chiefly from the apples themselves. Boiled cider, reduced by half before the apples go in, gives a deeper result still.
- ApplesA mix works better than one variety: a soft cooker such as McIntosh or a Cortland for body, a firmer tart apple for flavor. The recipe gives no quantities, only "fill a preserving-pan"; a large pan of quartered apples will cook down to a small fraction of its starting volume.
- "Slight flavoring" of spiceKeep it light: something on the order of a teaspoon of cinnamon to a quarter teaspoon of allspice and a scant eighth of cloves for a large panful. Spices concentrate along with everything else, so judge at the end rather than the beginning.
- Knowing when it is doneA spoonful on a cold plate should hold its shape with no ring of watery liquid seeping out at the edge. Five or six hours is realistic on a low burner; on a hot one you will burn it in two.
- StorageThis is not a canning procedure — covered jars left to stand for weeks were a nineteenth-century expectation, not a modern one. Refrigerate or freeze the finished butter, or follow a current tested water-bath processing schedule for apple butter if you want it shelf stable.
- "Substitute for butter"Meant literally: it was spread on bread in place of dairy butter, and it contains none. It is thick enough to hold on a slice without soaking in.