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Apple Butter
Boil one barrel of new cider down half, peel and core three bushels of good cooking apples; when the cider has boiled to half the quantity, add the apples, and when soft, stir constantly for from eight to ten hours. If done it will adhere to an inverted plate. Put away in stone jars (not earthen ware), covering first with writing-paper cut to fit the jar, and press down closely upon the apple butter; cover the whole with thick brown paper snugly tied down. Miss Sarah Thomson, Delaware.
This is a farm-scale recipe written for an outdoor copper kettle and a full day's work by several people. Everything about it scales down cleanly except the stirring, which is the whole job.
- The quantitiesA barrel of cider is 31.5 gallons and three bushels of apples is roughly 120-130 lb. A workable kitchen batch is 1 gallon of cider reduced to 2 quarts with about 4 lb of peeled, cored apples, which yields somewhere near 3 pints.
- "New cider"Fresh-pressed, unfermented sweet cider, not the fermented drink sold as cider in Britain and increasingly in the US. Unpasteurized cider from a press is closest to the original; pasteurized juice works but tastes flatter.
- Why no sugarThere is none in the recipe and none is needed. Boiling the cider by half concentrates its own sugar, and that concentration plus the apples' acid is what preserves the finished butter. The same principle explains the long cooking rather than a short boil with added sugar.
- Stirring is the recipeEight to ten hours of constant stirring is not exaggeration for an open kettle: apple butter scorches the moment it thickens and sits still, and a single burnt patch flavors the batch. In a modern kitchen a heavy pot in a 300F oven, stirred every 20-30 minutes, or a slow cooker with the lid ajar, does the same work with far less attention.
- The doneness testSpooning a little onto an inverted plate and seeing whether it clings is still the best test. It should hold in a mound with no ring of watery liquid weeping out at the edge.
- Stone, not earthenwareThe distinction was a real one. Stoneware is fired high and vitrified; the cheap red earthenware of the period carried lead glazes that acid foods leached. Use glass jars.
- The paper sealWriting paper pressed to the surface and brown paper tied over the top excludes air but not mold spores, and a crock kept this way in a cold cellar was expected to be skimmed. For keeping at room temperature, jar the butter and follow current tested water-bath processing times for apple butter; otherwise refrigerate it and use it within a few weeks.
- SeasoningThis version carries no spice at all. Cinnamon, allspice and clove are usual additions elsewhere and are best stirred in near the end, when the butter has thickened and you can taste it accurately.
Apple butter belongs to the pre-cheap-sugar economy of preserving, where fruit was made keepable by boiling it down until its own sugars and acid did the work. The technique is strongly associated with Pennsylvania German households and traveled west with them through Ohio, Indiana and the upper South, which is why a contributor from Delaware -- probably Delaware, Ohio, though the book gives only the town -- turns up with it in a book compiled largely from midwestern kitchens. An apple butter boiling was a communal autumn event: a copper kettle over a fire and a long-handled wooden stirrer worked in shifts. The stone-jar-and-paper storage described here is the oldest part of the recipe, older than the glass canning jar, and it survived in print for decades after sealed jars became common because it worked well enough in a cold cellar.