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Apple Butter
7 C apple pulp 7 C sugar 1¼ t cinnamon 1/2 t cloves 2 T ground cinnamon 1 T ground cloves Mrs. J. E. Triggs. 1/2 t nutmeg ¼ t allspice 2 T vinegar Salt Quarter and cook apples and put through colander. Add other ingredients and cook until thick. Seal hot.
A church-supper apple butter written in shorthand, with a spice list that has plainly been garbled somewhere between Mrs. Triggs's card and the printed page. Read the quantities before you start.
- The spice list contradicts itselfCinnamon appears twice (14 teaspoons and 2 tablespoons) and cloves twice (1/2 teaspoon and 1 tablespoon), which cannot both be intended. The smaller set — about 1/2 teaspoon cloves, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon allspice, with 2 tablespoons cinnamon — is proportionate to 7 cups of pulp; treat the larger figures as a printing error rather than a recipe.
- SaltGiven with no quantity. A scant teaspoon in this volume would not be out of place, but the recipe offers no guidance.
- Apple pulp, not apple slicesSeven cups is measured after cooking and sieving, so start with roughly 5 to 7 lb of apples. Tart cooking varieties break down without added pectin and carry the sugar.
- Cook the apples with almost no waterQuarter them unpeeled and uncored — the colander step removes skin and seeds and the skins contribute pectin and colour. A splash of water or cider in the bottom of the pan is enough to prevent scorching.
- Equal sugar means constant attentionSeven cups of sugar to seven of pulp will catch and burn once the mixture thickens. Use a wide heavy pan, stir down to the bottom often, and expect one to three hours depending on how much water is in the fruit.
- How to know it is thick enoughA spoonful mounded on a cold plate should hold its shape with no ring of liquid weeping out at the edge, and the butter should sheet off the spoon rather than drip. That is the test the original assumes you already know.
- "Seal hot" is not current canning practicePouring boiling preserves into jars and screwing the lids down was standard practice when this was written, but it does not reliably vent the jar or destroy surface moulds and yeasts. Follow present-day guidance and process filled half-pints or pints in a boiling water bath, or simply refrigerate or freeze the finished butter.
- YieldAbout 7 to 8 half-pints, depending on how far you reduce it.
Apple butter belongs to the long-keeping end of the fruit larder rather than the pickle shelf, though community cookbooks often filed it with pickles and relishes because both were sealed in jars. The technique is Pennsylvania German in its American form — apples cooked down in cider over an outdoor kettle for a whole day, stirred with a long-handled paddle so no one had to stand over the fire — and the name is generally taken to reflect the spreadable consistency, in line with the older English usage of "butter" for a thick fruit paste. A stovetop version like this one, with granulated sugar standing in for boiled-down cider and a short list of ground spices from a tin, shows the recipe adapted to an ordinary kitchen range. Its appearance over a contributor's name in a community fundraising cookbook is typical of the genre: the instructions are abbreviated to the point of obscurity because everyone contributing already knew what apple butter was supposed to look like.