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.