I told my daughter on the phone that I was making apple butter. “OH,” she said, “Now I know it’s really Fall.” That hit me in a good way, like it’s some kind of ritual/homey/grandmother-esque thing I’m doing.
I picked several kinds of apples at Sky Top Orchard near Hendersonville, N.C. a few days ago with a few die-hard friends with whom I do this most every year; the day was one of those unbelievably beautiful ones—perfect temperature and bright blue cloudless sky, and we took a picnic. It would have been worth the two hour drive just for that. The orchard there stretches on and on, rows of stubby apple trees dot every hillside as far as you can see, hand written signs marking the first of each row to tell the kind of apple.
Of course, the trees closest to the main building were stripped clean, so we had to pull our wagon over the bumpy ground for awhile until we could find fruit still hanging in the trees, bees buzzing over spent ones on the ground under them.
I picked about a half-bushel or so: Fuji, Granny Smith, Jonathon, Mutsu, and Arkansas Black. There might be a Winesap or two thrown in there, I can’t remember. Apple butter is best with a variety of tastes, sour and sweet.
I should of taken my camera along, but after toting that wagon full of apples around I don’t think I would have had the strength to lift it anyway.
Making the apple butter takes all day. It involves a lot of washing of jars, lids, rings, tools, the canner since I store it in the attic, apples, the apple parer/corer, and on and on.
Then I have to peel and core all those apples. I use about thirty or so apples for a batch. Thank goodness for my handy apple peeler/corer hand cranked apparatus. I don’t think I would make apple butter if it wasn’t for that little device I bought at the orchard many years ago. It’s cranked out many, many apples!
It's important to have the right tools for the job. If you're reading this and you're very young, always remember that. If you're not very young, well, you've already learned it the hard way like I did. Although I'm not old.
The apples go into my big enamel pot (in the old days they would use a big iron pot on the fire outside, stirring and adding apples as they cooked down. If I didn’t live in the city I would do that. No, I wouldn’t.) along with a half-gallon apple cider in which to simmer. I buy a carton of cider there at the orchard, where they make their own from the fresh apples. Store bought doesn’t taste the same, but it would do. Four cups of natural cane sugar, 3 teaspoons cinnamon—I always buy fresh—1and ½ teaspoons allspice, ¾ teaspoons cloves, and a small dollop of apple cider vinegar (to make it smooth) is added and then stirred, stirred, stirred. Be sure to stir frequently because that sugar tends to stick to the bottom of the pot and burn.
About eight hours later, you’ve got the most heavenly smelling, dark, rich, bubbling apple butter. The photo to the left shows the apples early on, before they cook down and turn dark.
I have a boiling water bath canner I’ve had for years, not a pressure canner. If you’re canning apples or something acid-y, you don’t usually need a pressure canner. But it’s VERY important to follow the directions for each thing you can, to prevent food poisoning.
So I process the pint jars in the boiling water for 10 minutes, take them out and set them on a clean towel on the counter, and listen to the lids pop, which is very satisfying since that means I did it right and there’s a vacuum seal in the jar.
It’s a lot of work, but at the end of the day it’s great to look at the rows of jars filled with home made apple butter cooling on the counter, ready to eat and give away too. To me, that alone says a lot for the old days.
