Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library - Foxfire Students (2011)

APPLE BUTTER

I’ve eaten apple butter all my life. Both my grandmother and mother have made it, but I had never seen it made in a brass kettle until I went to Rogersville, Tennessee. We were very lucky to find Mr. and Mrs. Pat Brooks, their family and grandchildren, who still make it the old-time way.

“Back years ago, you either made it or you didn’t eat it. This day and time everybody has got enough money. They don’t have to work like us poor folks. Nobody wants to take the time to make it, but they’ve all got their hand out for a jar.”

Pat was humorous and fun to be with. “Well, Honey, I’m going to tell you something. My daddy was this way [humorous] and I ain’t never seen a stranger in my life. Just enjoy your life, for when you’re dead, you can’t.”

Obviously he lives by his word. “I have fun everywhere I go. That’s what we’re here for.”

I remember when I was left in charge of the tape recorder, Pat asked me, “You got your tape recorder on? You want to give me some sugar!” Pat just naturally does things like that.

As we were pouring the apple sauce into the brass kettle to cook, he told us about a trick he pulled on his wife. “Now I’ve got to tell you about my wife when she put on her first pair of shorts. She came outside and when she did, I just wheeled my chair around in front of the door. Here come these people down the road in a car. She was just a’jerking me trying to get in the house, so in order for them to see her [wearing shorts], I just screamed and hollered like I was dying, so they would look. And she said, ‘I’ll never put the dern things on again, I bet you.’ ”

We were taking turns at stirring the apple butter when he brought out a rolling pin that belonged to his grandmother. “I’d like to sell this rolling pin. We’re going to have a little auction. What do you bid?”

ILLUSTRATION 15 The apples must first be washed and peeled.

Bids started at five cents and ended with $4.75.

… going once, going twice, gone—sold to Laurie.

Later he told his wife, “We had a sale here a while ago—a rolling pin. I got three neck hugs, four squeezes and nine kisses with it.”

After the first stir came off the fire, everyone was sampling the product with hot, homemade biscuits. Meanwhile, Pat had gone in the house and brought out his banjo and was making a deal with Barbara and Mary to buck dance. We had our own little outdoor concert. He sang a couple of songs, gave us each some apple butter, and we were on our way back home.

VIVIAN BURRELL

The making of apple butter was once a quite common event. We talked to a number of people about it, and we found that, in addition to the Brooks method (illustrated in this chapter), there were many variations.

Pauline Henson and Mrs. Charlie Ross Hartley of Vilas, North Carolina, for example, used molasses instead of sugar. Here’s their recipe:

Wash, slice, core and peel the required number of apples. Put a little water in the brass kettle first and heat, and then add the slices of apple filling the kettle nearly full. Cook them down, and stir them to prevent sticking. After they are cooked down, add molasses to thicken. The molasses is added after the apples are cooked down to keep the butter from being lumpy.

Just before it’s done, add sticks of cinnamon to taste. Then, when it’s so thick you can almost cut it with a knife, put it up in half gallon or gallon crocks; place a cloth over the top, and seal the crocks with paraffin.

ILLUSTRATION 16 The apples are cooked on a stove for fifteen to twenty minutes, then run through a colander.

They can also remember apple butter being made in the molasses boiler during the last runs to get rid of the extra apples and keep them from going to waste.

Aunt Arie made hers in an iron washpot instead of a brass kettle, as she never had one of the latter. She told us:

“We always had so many good apples. See, we had an apple orchard there at home. We had hundreds of bushels of apples, till it come that storm and blowed the trees all up and Ulysses never did set’em back out. The few trees that were left made up more than we could use and he got old and crippled on both sides, couldn’t dig much. And you can’t hire people to do what you want done. You just have to do what you can do. Of course, we had plenty of apples. We’ve done away with three hundred bushels in one year. I tell you, I got so tired of picking up apples and carrying them to the house and giving them to everybody in Georgia and everywhere else, till I was glad when they were gone! Now that’s the truth. Of course, I was stout then and could do it, but you done so much of it, you got tired of it. What I mean, you got give out of it—I’ll put it that way. Your strength give out.

ILLUSTRATION 17 The applesauce is poured into a twenty-gallon brass kettle heated by an open fire. (The kettle must be cleaned with a solution of vinegar and baking soda prior to use.) Mrs. Brooks said, “Brass is the only kind [of kettle] I would have. It just makes better butter somehow. I don’t like a copper kettle because it makes the butter taste, I think.”

Pat told us, “You can use any kind of wood for the fire except pine. [Pine would make the butter taste.] Don’t let the wood touch the bottom of the kettle or the butter will burn.”

ILLUSTRATION 18 Pat made the butter-stirring stick himself out of cypress. Wood with acid in it can’t be used because it will impart a taste. He likes yellow poplar the best.

ILLUSTRATION 19 (Top) Pat’s stirring stick. (Bottom) The applesauce is constantly stirred until it’s hot enough to melt sugar. Then, using one five-pound bag at a time at regular intervals, fifty pounds of sugar are poured in. The mixture must cook for about two hours, stirring it constantly.

“When you stir, you go once on one side, once on the other side, and once in the middle. You see, the bottom is narrow, and that way it won’t stick.”

ILLUSTRATION 20 As the apple butter cooks, Pat brings out his banjo to liven up the proceedings.

ILLUSTRATION 21 After two hours’ cooking, the mixture is taken off the fire, and 4¼ fluid ounces of imitation oil of cinnamon (used by the Brooks) or other desired flavor is added.

“Use good ripe, soft apples. Peel the apples and cut them up—not too fine. Add just enough water to prevent the apples from sticking while they cook. When the apples begin cooking good, mash them with a potato masher as fine as possible. Make the apple butter thick. Then add lots of sorghum to it for sweetening (if you don’t, it’ll sour). If you don’t get the apple butter good and thick, and boil it down good, a five-gallon jarful will sour. Add ground cinnamon for flavoring. If you can’t get cinnamon, use lemon.

“To store it, use five six-gallon crocks; tie the tops with cloth, then cover with paper and tie with string. When we wanted apple butter, we opened a crock and got out a bowlful, ate it, and went back for more.

“Lord, they loved apple butter at my house, mercy alive. See, there was so many boys and you know what boys will do. And Papa loved it! I can eat apple butter, but I never did love it like they did.”

The Brooks family has been making apple butter every year for over forty years.

It takes three bushels of apples to make a stir. You can keep the apples for three or four days before using them in the apple butter. Mrs. Brooks explains, “I wouldn’t have nothing but the Winesaps. That’s the only kind that makes good butter. The other kind won’t cook up good. Sour apples do. An apple that has a sweet taste to it [won’t] make good butter.”

Mrs. Brooks says, “Sometimes [we sell it], but most of the time we keep it. The family likes it. They must; every time I turn around they’re asking for some.”

I understand!

Aunt Arie also told us of other recipes that were brought to mind when we asked her about apple butter. “Now another thing that really I like a little better in one way is apple preserves. You make preserves out of the kind of apples that don’t cook all to pieces—that stay whole.

“You peel the apples and cut them up into little pieces—they don’t cook up. Put cinnamon or whatever you want to flavor them with. We put them in big old jars and tied them up. People don’t can stuff now like they did then. Of course, if I was to make apple butter now, I’d want to put it in smaller jars and seal them up. And then eat it. You’d have it good all the time. Apple preserves are good!

“I’ve helped make gallons of apple cider. You have to have a cider mill to grind up your apples most of the time. Squeeze that all out and put it up. It’s hard to make. I don’t like apple cider much. Boys, they loved it at home, though. We’d make it by the gallons. We’d fix the apples and put them in a big old wooden trough. We’d take a maul and beat up them apples and make cider out of them. They’d strain the cider out and put it in jugs or whatever they wanted to keep it in. How they did love it! Especially when it’s sharp, as they called it. They left it till some of it commenced to sour just a little [and then they really enjoyed it.]

ILLUSTRATION 22 The apple butter is now done and ready to be poured into jars. Each stir (three bushels of apples) yields about seventy-five jars.

ILLUSTRATION 23 “It’s s’good that if you put some on your forehead, your tongue would slap your brains out trying t’get to it!” PAT BROOKS.

“You make pumpkin butter like you do apple butter. Cut the pumpkin up and peel it and cook that good. Then just mash it up and put sugar and flavoring in. That’s all you have to do. We always made ours with cinnamon, and how good it was! Really pumpkin butter is easier to make than apple butter. We grew as high as a hundred big pumpkins in one year. We’d make it up to last a year and eat it every bit up before spring. We’d have to make a’many a gallon to have enough to do us a year, ’cause we loved it. Then there was so many of us. You take a houseful of boys—they eat something!”