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CIDER APPLE SAUCE (This is a variety of butter)
This is a variety of butter dear to the hearts of the old-fashioned housekeeper, in whose home it formed part of the winter preserve. Reduce a quantity of cider, as directed in the preceding recipe. Pare, core and quarter the apples, and the larger the fruit the better for this purpose. Cook the apples in cider, a few at a time, until they can be pierced with a straw, cooking them very slowly and putting in only so many at a time as will float on the top of the cider. Great care should be taken to keep the apples from breaking. Skim them out carefully, lay them out upon flat dishes, returning to the kettle all the cider that drains from the fruit. Add more apples to the cider, and when cooked lay upon the dish and so continue until all are stewed. A quart of this "boiled-down" cider will generally be sufficient for a quart of apples; but this cannot be always depended on, as some varieties of the fruit absorb much more largely than do others. When all the apples are cooked, boil the cider down one-third again or until it is like thin syrup. Place the apples in a stone jar, pour the cider on them, and set away. It will keep well all winter, and has a deliciously dark color.
B
Whole quarters of apple poached in reduced cider until translucent, then packed in their own syrup. It is closer to a preserved compote than to the thick apple butter the name suggests.
- The hinge: keep the quarters wholeCook only enough apple at a time to float in a single layer, at a bare simmer, and lift each piece out as soon as a straw (or a thin skewer) slides in. Crowding the pan or letting it boil breaks the fruit down and you end up with sauce rather than the intended glossy quarters.
- Reduced ciderThe "preceding recipe" (not reproduced on this page) is for boiling down fresh sweet cider to a thin dark syrup; the degree of reduction is not stated here. Commercial boiled cider or cider syrup does the same job; do not substitute hard cider or cider vinegar.
- ProportionsA quart of boiled-down cider to a quart of prepared apples, as the text says, with the warning that absorbent varieties will drink more. Keep extra reduced cider on hand rather than topping up with fresh cider, which would thin the syrup.
- Choice of appleThe recipe asks only for the largest fruit; large, firm apples hold their shape best. Northern Spy, Baldwin, Granny Smith and Winesap are good keepers. Mealy or early apples such as McIntosh are more likely to break up.
- No added sugarAll the sweetness comes from the concentrated cider, which is why the final reduction matters. Boiling the drained syrup down by a further third gives the keeping quality and the dark color the recipe promises.
- Storage, then and nowA stone jar in a cold cellar is the original assumption. Use a clean glass jar in the refrigerator and treat it as a few weeks' keeping; for anything shelf-stable, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure with measured headspace and processing time.
- YieldA quart of apples is on the order of a pound and a half of fruit before paring; the finished quantity depends on how much cider the fruit absorbs. Serve it as a sweet relish with pork, ham or sausage, or spooned over cream or rice pudding.
Boiled cider was the sweetener of the northeastern apple country: presses ran in October, and cider reduced over a fire kept well and stood in for sugar and molasses in households where both cost money. "Cider apple sauce" is one of a family of cider-and-fruit preserves — apple butter, apple molasses, pear and quince in cider syrup — that made a bushel of windfalls last through a winter without a cellar full of sugar. The Butterick Cook Book, published in 1911 by the pattern company for a mostly urban and suburban readership, sets the recipe down with a note of nostalgia: by then cider was being displaced by cheap refined sugar, and the compiler is preserving a rural practice her readers were more likely to remember than to keep up. The "B" at the end of the recipe is unexplained.