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Apple Butter
5 quarts apple pulp 10 quarts new sweet cider Brown sugar 1 teaspoon ground cloves 1 teaspoon ground allspice 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon The apples should be tart and the cider not more than two days old. Boil the cider down one half before measuring; put the pared and cored apples through a fruit press; measure them and add to the cider. Cook slowly, stirring frequently, and when the butter begins to thicken sweeten to taste with brown sugar. Continue cooking until of the consistency of soft jam; pack while hot in sterilized jars or glasses and keep in a cool place.
A full apple-butter boiling in the old style: cider reduced by half, then fruit cooked down in it for hours. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the method assumes a wide copper kettle and someone to stir it.
- Scale it downTen quarts of cider and five of pulp is a day's work over a large kettle, and the finished butter will be only a fraction of the starting volume. Quartering the recipe fits a heavy 8-quart Dutch oven and behaves the same way.
- "New sweet cider"Unfermented, unpasteurized fresh-pressed cider, not hard cider and not vinegar. The two-day limit is about catching it before wild yeast starts working. Fresh unfiltered cider from a press or the refrigerated case is the closest thing now; avoid anything with added preservatives, which can taste harsh when reduced.
- The pulpThe recipe says only to put pared and cored apples through a fruit press; a press or food mill of this kind works most easily on fruit already softened. Quarter and core tart apples, cook them with a splash of water or cider until collapsing, then pass through a food mill or press. Skins left in before milling add pectin and color, though this recipe pares them.
- Boil the cider firstReduce the cider by half before the pulp goes in. The original's 'before measuring' is ambiguous about whether the 10 quarts is measured before or after reduction. The reduction is where much of the depth and sweetness comes from.
- Stirring and scorchingThis is the hinge. Once the pulp goes in, sugar concentrates against the bottom of the pot and burns quickly; scrape the whole base with a flat-edged spoon every few minutes. Many cooks now finish apple butter in a 300F oven or a slow cooker with the lid ajar, which removes most of the scorch risk at the cost of a longer cook.
- Tart applesNot fussiness. Tart varieties carry more acid, which helps the butter set and keep. Baldwin, Winesap, Granny Smith and Northern Spy all work; a sweet dessert apple gives a cloying, loose result.
- Sweeten lateAdding brown sugar early increases the scorching risk and makes it hard to judge, since the butter tastes sweeter as it reduces. Wait until it has visibly thickened, as written.
- Doneness"Consistency of soft jam" tests out as a spoonful on a cold plate that holds its shape with no ring of liquid weeping at the edge. It will firm further on cooling.
- StorageHot-packing into sterilized jars and keeping them cool was standard practice when this was written, but open-kettle filling is no longer considered adequate for shelf storage. Either refrigerate the jars and use within a few weeks, freeze them, or process filled jars in a boiling water bath following the times in a current tested canning guide.
Apple butter is a preserve made by reduction rather than by sugar alone: cider boiled down to a syrup, then loaded with fruit pulp and cooked until the sugars concentrate and darken. It is strongly associated with Pennsylvania German households, where lattwaerick was made in autumn in large copper kettles over an outdoor fire, the boiling often a communal event with neighbors taking turns at the long-handled stirrer. The technique predates cheap refined sugar and cheap glass jars, and the sugar here is added to taste at the end rather than as a structural ingredient. Five quarts of pulp is a farm quantity, put up once a year when the presses were running.