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Apple Butter
Two gallons of reduced cider; one peck of apples; cinnamon, nutmeg to taste.
New cider is used for this butter, and to "reduce" it it should be boiled until but half of the original quantity remains. As this requires some time for the boiling down, it is obviously wise to do this the day before the butter is to be made. Pare, core and quarter the apples and place as many of them in the kettle as the cider will moisten, adding more of the apples as the first are cooked. Stir almost constantly, beating the apples to a pulp as fast as they soften. When the whole is reduced to a thick paste, add the spices to taste, and after boiling a few minutes longer take from the fire and seal. The butter should be rich, dark-red brown. No sugar is allowed, the cider being sweet enough. If the butter becomes too thick at the last of the boiling, thin it with a small quantity of fresh cider; if it is not thick enough, add more apples.
A long, unsweetened boil that depends entirely on cider for its sugar. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are large and the storage advice is a century out of date.
- Start with four gallons of ciderThe recipe calls for two gallons of reduced cider, meaning you boil down four gallons of fresh sweet cider to half. Doing that the day before, as the text says, is genuinely the sensible order of work.
- "New cider"Fresh, unfermented sweet cider — the cloudy autumn pressing, not hard cider and not cider vinegar. Pasteurized supermarket cider works; avoid anything with added preservatives, which can turn bitter over a long reduction.
- A peck of applesTen to twelve pounds, or roughly 30 medium apples, before paring and coring. Tart, firm cooking varieties break down best; a mix gives better flavor than a single sweet dessert apple.
- Scorching is the whole difficultyWith no sugar and a very long boil, the puree will catch and burn the moment stirring stops. Use the heaviest-bottomed pot you own over low heat, and stir down to the bottom, not just around the surface.
- Pot materialUnlined copper or bare cast iron will react with the acid over hours of cooking and darken the flavor. Enameled cast iron or stainless steel is the modern equivalent of the old preserving kettle.
- Judging the finish"Thick paste" means a spoonful mounded on a cold plate releases no ring of watery liquid at the edge. The dark red-brown color comes from long slow browning of the sugars and fruit over hours, so resist raising the heat to hurry it.
- SpicesAdd cinnamon and nutmeg only at the end, as written — hours of boiling flattens ground spice. Start with about a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of nutmeg for this volume and adjust.
- "Seal" is obsolete adviceLadling hot butter into jars and capping them, with no further processing, was common practice when this was written and is no longer accepted; it gives an unreliable seal and invites surface mold. Refrigerate or freeze the finished butter, or follow a current tested water-bath canning process for apple butter.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly seven to nine pints. Halving or quartering the recipe is straightforward and much easier to stir.
Apple butter belongs to the cider country of the mid-Atlantic and the Pennsylvania German counties, where it was made outdoors in copper kettles as a communal autumn job — the constant stirring, with a long-handled wooden paddle, was the reason several people were needed. Its point was economy: before cheap refined sugar, a fruit preserve that took no sugar at all and kept through the winter on the strength of boiled-down cider was worth a full day's labor. The insistence that "no sugar is allowed" places it squarely in that older tradition. The name describes a spreading consistency, not any dairy content.