Apple Butter

A no longer barfy Ezra.

Ezra was not feeling well when we got home. She was mopey and wouldn't eat her dinner and we were of course concerned, given her age, but we also knew the duck snacks she had form our previous night's dinner were probably bit much for her. She went to bed with her bowl for the most part disregarded, but it seemed a night's rest would do her much of the good she needed. I was up late as usual. About two hours after she went to bed she got up and pawed at the door to be let out, which I obliged. She was out for a few minutes, then came back in, much as she usually does. An hour or so after that she came out of the bedroom again, this time with some urgency, pawed at the door, and promptly barfed in the corner before I could rouse myself to let her out. I opened the door and she went out as I was cleaning up, and when she came back only moments later, she had a bounce in her step and a bright countenance. She went directly to the kitchen, finished her dinner, and went back to bed as if nothing had happened.

I had made some chicken stock (for Ezra) tonight and the bones along with paper towels full of dog barf merited a trip to the garbage can before morning. In my house that means a trudge across the front yard and tonight it was the most perfect of winter nights. It was deathly cold all day today and tonight was colder yet. But it was as still as within a vacuum outside. The wind is usually a bit of a bully here, so close to the lake, but tonight it could not have been more serene. The clouds had broken up and the stars were out, along with a sliver of moon. For the better part of the late afternoon and evening, chunky, meandering snowflakes lazed their way to the ground, or rather to rest gently upon their predecessors on every horizontal surface. Before long, the rails of the deck were covered in the same skein of light snow as the tree branches which will pose narcissistically in the morning for soon to be Facebook posted photos.

I am up late tonight, though, not just for the gin and dog barf, but because there is apple butter bubbling away in two slow cookers and the oven. A few days ago, our neighbor Al Meusen, who tends the orchard across the street, stopped to offer Ulla some apples and pears. She figured she'd take a handful or two, but he ended up leaving her about two bushels of apples and a half bushel of pears. She invited Amy and I to share in this little windfall if we would help in the processing. It was decided that we would make applesauce and apple butter, and some canned poached pear for Ulla, and for some reason, the overwhelming majority of the apples were committed to the butter instead of sauce.

This was perfectly acceptable to me, though I worried about the practicality of such a quantity. Apple butter was lingering in my mother's larder with regularity when I was growing up, one of the many legacies of Appalachia that found their way into our home in the north via my mother and her roots. Apple butter tastes like home to me, maybe more than any other food. It has been far too long since I have enjoyed a home made biscuit with dark, sticky apple butter slathered across it.

It has been some time since I made it because the last time was a sobering moment in my cult like love of all things cooking that spring from Mom. A few years ago I had a bushel of apples, and knowing full well the apple butter I wanted to make was the one Mom made, I called and asked her for the recipe. She laughed and told me she just threw a jar of applesauce in the slow cooker with some spices. I was crestfallen. Apple butter was important to me and to learn that it was something Mom found an acceptable short cut for was disheartening to say the least. I suddenly found myself in a wilderness, wondering what other short cuts were lingering in my childhood favorites, but also, without mentorship regarding the correct path to take for the apples before me, right now in this very moment. For the first time, Mom left me hanging.

Of course, getting to the point Mom started at, with apple sauce, is pretty simple. And of course, it turns out Mom has made apple butter from apples many, many times. But as her days became more and more crowded, the "cheater" apple butter was a way for her to keep a piece of something in her pantry that had real culinary importance in her family in spite of a lack of spare time to cook apples down and mill them. Still, it was a moment of pause for me. Not so long after, I learned after years of begging for "the secret", that Aunt Bobbie used Crisco in the biscuits I loved so much. For a minute, my world was falling apart.

With time I came to understand that the real secret ingredient in Aunt Bobby's biscuits was Aunt Bobbie: her hands, which moved as her mother had taught her. And I learned that Mom could make great apple butter from canned apple sauce because she knew apple butter form the inside, she knew the path that needed walking enough to know which details mattered and which could be breezed over in an effort to keep meaningful cooking before the children. She, tired and tattered and stressed, could have just bought apple butter. Instead, she went as far back in the process as made sense in her kitchen. She bought apple sauce, and stayed up late one night when no one noticed, and spiced and sugared, and simmered, stirred, and canned.

Apple butter ready for cooking.

Tonight we steamed apples and had a marathon of food milling. We added apple cider, some sugar (far less than recommended) some spices, some dusty old bottles of brandy. There was so much apple puree, but I thought between the two houses we could fit it into our slow cookers. We, of course, could not. I had to load the last of it into my fortieth birthday present, an enormous, oval Le Cruset pot. When Amy had asked me what I wanted for my fortieth, I only slightly jokingly said I wanted a Dutch oven big enough to cook an entire oxtail at once (at the time we were eating oxtail frequently and I was tired of the hassle of cooking a whole tail in batches -- risks the quality of the fond). She came through in spades.

Reducing the sugar in a preserve recipe affects how it will set. Pectin and sugar are allies in gelling so when we made the decision to reduce the sugar (by two thirds) in our recipe, we had to compensate by cooking longer and relying on evaporation to do part of the job. This lowers yields, but concentrates the fruit, and you end up with something that is not so cloyingly sweet.

When we were discussing Al's generosity Fred remarked how spoiled he sometimes felt with our lives here on the hill. Not just with the generosity of the neighborhood, but of the overflowing culinary wealth in our larders and freezers. But nights like this, and the labor day Sunday spent canning tomatoes, and the four days of Pig Week we spent butchering the hogs, make it a well deserved embarrassment of riches.

We adapted an apple butter recipe from the Ball Complete Book Of Home Preserving. I think we may have cut the quantity of sugar a bit too far. The butter is bubbling away in the slow cookers and I'm extrapolating the results a bit, but the recipe below reflects my thought that the sugar should get bumped up a bit. We really liked the idea of using cider and that's why we chose this recipe. Also, we had to take a low and slow approach with the reduced sugar, so the cooking method deviated from their recommendation. We spiced ours differently (I am not a huge fan of cloves) and added some brandy leftover from New Holland's early forays into distilling, partially because Ulla was tired of it hanging around.

So here's what we ended up with:

Apple Butter
Yields a metric shit ton

30# apple puree, made by steaming the whole, unpeeled apple until completely soft (the peels and cores contain a good amount of pectin) and passing through the finest plate of a food mill
1 gallon of fresh apple cider
7 cups of sugar
2 TB ground cinnamon
1 TB ground nutmeg
1 TB ground ginger
1 fifth apple brandy or dark rum

Combine the ingredients and load them into slow cookers or cook them on the stove top in a heavy bottomed pan over a very low heat, stirring frequently, until there is no remaining free liquid and the apple butter is firm and smooth when chilled. Pour into hot half pint jars and process in a water bath for 10 minutes.

Our Lives' Wedding With The World

Last year, a few days before we were to slaughter the hogs, I slept fitfully if at all. Death and animals were on my mind a lot. At the time, Amy and I were close to losing Japhy, our very loved dog, at fourteen. She was grey in the muzzle. Her legs didn't really work as they were meant to anymore. But she was sweet and loving as she had always been, perhaps more so. We knew that she would do her best to keep going. That was her way. She was going to force us to choose the day that she wasn't going to be with us anymore. It is a horrible thing to think that you will schedule the day you will kill a creature you love so much, a day, that if nature could be circumvented, you would hold at bay forever. When the weather began to gray and turn cold, I thought it mirrored my heart in ways I was not prepared to face. I was not ready for gloom and sadness in the skies when I looked up from the lifeless body of my long time companion.

So that fall as the demise of Japhy was looming, I couldn't help but feel a little emotionally squeezed as we made the decision to slaughter the hogs on the farm instead of sending them away to an abbatoir. Ulla championed them staying home, where they would be cared for and loved until the end. She stayed in the house until the deed was done, but it didn't take long to see how brave she actually was. Most people who raise animals for meat avoid forming a real bond with them. I remembered thinking that Ulla would regret naming these pigs, and petting them, and playing with them, and caring for them with genuine affection, that it would take a great emotional toll on her. What I didn't know, is that she understood that from the beginning and she didn't care. What mattered to her was that the lives they lived were wonderful. If she withdrew from them, it would be to protect herself and that would be of no help to the animals.

So she loved them. And slowly, the rest of us decided we could love them too. This year and last we told stories about these hogs like they were our pets. We laughed about their antics and felt genuine sorrow when they were gone. But we also understood that they were there for a purpose, and without this purpose, they would't have existed at all. And in the end, there is a job that must be done and to do that job well was meaningful.

We had four hogs this year, twice the herd. The experience last year was so overwhelmingly positive that we were immediately convinced that pigs would be on the farm the next year. Fred hatched a plan to get some friends involved in year two. We invited people out to be a part of the slaughter, butchery and charcuterie of these four hogs because we knew we should share it. The learning curve had flattened a bit from year one, and the path to flattening it out further next year became more obvious. Fred began to talk of handling the shot himself instead of leaving it to someone else. If not the shot next year, a gun and some shooting lessons.

Sleep was again elusive the night before this year's slaughter. No one likes the idea (and certainly not the practice) of killing animals. Darrell, the farmer who supplies Red Horse with pigs, a man who has been around this particular farm chore his whole life, is the first to admit a distaste for it. But Darrell was there on the day of our slaughter, an indispensable participant in every way. The farm was set up and fires were blazing. My heart sank when the first pig went down, and again with each of the four, but immediately the work to preserve these animals as food at the highest level possible became priority and just as quickly a sense of accomplishment and reverence set in. Smiles began to spill across faces in the group that only moments before wore sadness.

And everyone set to work. Some were watching the temperature of the water churning on the smoky fire, some began to scrape bristles while others went off to attend to the next kill. Ulla kept us fed and caffeinated, roasted chestnuts, and wrapped an arm around those who needed it. Amy, loathed to see anything wasted from so generous a gift, put aside the swelling of her full heart to climb into the pen to collect blood. Not minutes before, she scratched his head and smiled lovingly at him. The year before, after the first pig went down, the first ever in our circle, she saw that Fred, who held that pig down during the stick, was a little shaken. Amy walked over and hugged him briefly. He closed his eyes, he rested his chin on the top of her head and forgot for a moment, his boots, for the first time since he became a farmer, covered in blood.

This year, the last pig to go started to get a bit agitated. Not stressed, but nervous. We decided it was best to not let this state persist or get worse. "Do you want to scrape or kill?" Fred asked. Five of us gathered in the pen. Travis took his time, as usual, to find a still moment, a moment of peace to take the shot. He fell. Travis stuck. He ran away in his dreams as we tried our best to keep him still. He slowed for a moment, then ran again, going nowhere. The same as the three before him. I suddenly heard myself whispering to him that it was all ok. Scratching him behind the ear. I looked up toward the fire and the first of the pigs was split and ready for butchery. As the sun started to set, that cliched "good tired" of a hard day's work began to set in, doubled with the relief of knowing we had done our best, done well, by the animals in our care.

Some say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I think the same applies when it comes to how we relate to the animals we eat. To withdraw your engagement with animals as food (or as companions, tools, or simply as unseen neighbors) and think that somehow this makes life better for them is at best naive. Left to the flippancy of mother nature, a death in the wild typically comes with great suffering. This is why we call a death with mitigated suffering a "humane" death, because as humans, as creatures with an understanding of suffering and death beyond simple physical responses, the best among us try to do better than disease, starvation, and injury without medical attention.

We are by nature omnivores, which means at some point in history we were (and sometimes still are) predators. Eventually, farming replaced hunting as the primary means of obtaining meat and this perhaps began a new conversation about the morality of eating animals. Sometimes, even the most ardent vegan will aquiesce at hunting, unable to reconcile the idea that without it overpopulation would cause great suffering in wild game populations, and that all humans, including vegans, are to blame for this. It occurs to me, then, that their problem is with farming, not the act of eating meat.

That one bad day a well cared for animal ends up at, the day the gun and the knife come out, especially at a farm that claims to care about its animals, seems to the soft hearted as betrayal: a friend and caregiver who steps up and performs unspeakable violence against them. But it is is not. It is fulfillment. It is the delivery of the promise we made these animals when they came to be under our stewardship. We promised to find a place for them in this world, a world that we have selfishly usurped and callously neglected to account for them in.

In exchange we ask for blood. But if there is no blood, there is no deal. There is no room in this world for them unless we fulfill our obligations to one another. Should we decide to not eat them any longer, we reduce them to nuisance, and then to extinction.

I tire easily of the banal rhetoric that sometimes passes for a defense of animal rights. They say life is sacred but it is not. Life, whether short or long, influential or transient, has definition which outlasts the corporeal. It's entirety, which includes death and the impact it has on its successors, is equally significant, but we shortsightedly see value only in what is before us readily, the "real world". Life is a moment, a blur, a minute piece in a long and unknowable continuum, a continuum that is forever changed by even the slightest shrug from every life and this is what gives life its real beauty. Death is not cruel. Death is not a thing apart from life. We toast to death. We praise and thank the dead. We welcome it as a part of life and living. When we close our eyes and plug our ears and pretend death is not among us, we dishonor everything that was once real. And when we pretend that it is better to disregard a living creature than it is to bring it into our lives, care for it and see that it has a good and humane death, we commit an act of emotional selfishness. I wonder if there is a difference between the gluttonous meat eater who has no association between meat in a package and an animal, and the vegan who thinks his diet eschews violence and acts in advocacy of a creature he has made extensive effort to have no interaction with.

There is no tragedy in a good life followed by a kind death. Tragedy is in suffering. Pain, abuse, cruelty, indifference. Indifference. As long as I don't pull the trigger I am not culpable. This is cruelty: caring more about keeping the keel of your emotions stable than the day to day welfare of the creatures you share the earth with. Maybe to call it cruelty is hyperbole, but it is certainly not advocacy. No vegan has ever spared an animal death. The conscientious meat eater who chooses to buy meat from farms that care for their animals makes a real world impact on animal welfare. That one bad day is coming for us all. I wonder what the ultimate aim of veganism in defense of animals is, since it can't be an end to death. It seems to me their stance is more about protecting their own precarious emotional well being than opting in and understanding the relationship between people and agrarian animals in a real and meaningful way, the good, bad, and ugly in it.

As it turned out, Japhy outlived the first year's pigs until spring. We had walks every day that winter that brought joy to all involved and her almost absurdly happy face lasted until the end. When we laid her down for the last time on the porch where she loved to nap, it occurred to me that she was not sad, not nervous, that she was not drifting away wishing for just one more day. She lived until it didn't make sense for her to do so anymore. And then she was gone. A firm, embracing breeze was rattling through the tree's new leaves. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny spring day.