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CIDER APPLE SAUCE (Reduce by boiling four quarts)
Reduce by boiling, four quarts of new cider to two quarts. Pare, quarter and put into the kettle enough apples to fill it and stew the cider and apples together over a moderate fire, four hours. Flavor with cinnamon if liked.
This is apple butter in its plainest form: cider boiled down to concentrate its sugars, then apples cooked in it until they collapse. The whole dish depends on managing scorch over a long, slow reduction.
- "New cider" means fresh sweet ciderUnfermented, unpasteurized juice pressed that season, not hard cider and not filtered apple juice. Cloudy pasteurized sweet cider from a farm stand is the closest supermarket equivalent; clarified juice reduces to something thinner and flatter.
- The hinge: keep it moving as it thickensOnce the fruit breaks down, the sugars concentrate and the mixture will catch on the bottom and taint the whole batch with burnt flavor. Stir down to the bottom of the pan every ten to fifteen minutes for the last hour or two, and drop the heat as it darkens.
- "Moderate fire" on a rangeRead it as a steady, gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil. On gas or electric that is low heat with a heavy-bottomed pot; a thin pan will scorch no matter how carefully you stir.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of cider is a gallon, reduced to two quarts, perhaps half an hour to an hour of hard boiling in a wide pan. The recipe does not say how big the kettle is; "enough apples to fill it" might come to 5 or 6 lb of pared, quartered fruit if the kettle holds six to eight quarts.
- Which applesThe recipe names no variety. Tart, firm cooking apples that fall apart with long stewing suit it: Northern Spy, Baldwin, Gravenstein. Modern dessert varieties bred for crunch and sweetness hold their shape longer and give a blander result.
- CinnamonAdd it in the last hour, not at the start; four hours of boiling flattens ground spice. A stick or two of cassia fished out at the end gives a cleaner flavor than powder.
- Yield and keepingExpect a few pints of thick sauce; the original gives no figure. It also gives no preserving instructions, so treat it as a fresh product: refrigerate and use within two weeks, or freeze. If you want it shelf stable, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for apple butter rather than improvising.
Cider apple sauce is a New England and Pennsylvania farmhouse economy dish, the ancestor of what most American cooks now call apple butter. Before cheap refined sugar, boiled-down cider was itself the sweetener, and a gallon was commonly reduced to a half-gallon to concentrate its flavor. Whole communities held apple-butter boilings in autumn, working outdoors over open fires in copper kettles with long-handled paddles; the four-hour stew here is the domestic, kitchen-range version of that. Its appearance in The Butterick Cook Book (1911), a volume aimed squarely at the middle-class household and issued by a pattern company, shows how far such rural preserving habits had followed families into town kitchens.