Apple Butter

Apple Butter is a well-known vintage recipe historically used to preserve apples. The recipe goes back to the European Middle Ages, where it started off as a medicant - as did many other sweet recipes. Apple Butter was a rare sweet which did not require sugar, the sweetness gathered by using concentrated cider in which sweet apples were boiled. Brought to America by immigrants from the Rhine river valley, the recipe was used to preserve apples grown by the Pennsylvania Dutch. Apple Butter spread across the apple growing communities of America, with apple butter frolics becoming a popular community event. 

This apple Butter recipe isn't the earliest, so not needed in sharing the tale of the recipe. However, being part of Lettice Bryant's "Kentucky Housewife", has a significane in its own right. A whole slew of Apple Butter recipes appeared in print in the late 1830s. 

[1839] Apple Butter

Cider for apple butter must be perfectly new form the press, and the sweeter and mellower the apples are of which it is made, the better will the apple butter be. Boil the cider till reduced to one half its original quantity, and skim it well. Do not use for this purpose an iron kettle, or the butter will be very dark, and if you use a brass or copper kettle, it must be scoured as clean and bright as possible, before you put the cider into it, and you must not suffer the butter to remain in it a minute longer than is actually necessary to prepare it, or it will imbibe a copperish taste, that will render it not only unpleasant, but really unhealthy. It is best to prepare it late in the fall, when the apples are quite mellow. Select those that have a fine flavor, and will cook tender; pare and quarter them from the cores, and boil them in the cider till perfectly soft, having plenty of cider to cover them well. If you wish to make it on a small scale, do not remove the apples from the cider when they get soft, but continue to boil them gently in it, till the apples and cider form a thick smooth marmalade, which you must stir almost constantly towards the last. A few minutes before you take it from the fire, flavor it highly with cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves, and when the seasonings are well intermixed, put it up in jars, tie folded paper over them, and keep them in a cool place. If made in a proper manner, it will keep a good more than a year, and will be found very convenient, being always in readiness. Many people who are in the habit of making apple butter, take it from the fire before it is boiled near enough. Both to keep it well, and taste well, it should be boiled long after the apples have become soft, and towards the last, simmered over coals till it gets almost thick enough to slice. If you wish to make it on a large scale, after you have boiled the first kettle full of apples soft, remove them from the cider, draining them with a perforated ladle, that the cider may fall again to the kettle, and put them into a clean tub. Fill up the kettle with fresh apples, having them pared and sliced from the cores, and having ready a kettle of boiling cider, that is reduced to at least half its original quantity; fill up the kettle of apples with it as often as is necessary. When you have boiled in this manner as many apples as you wish, put the whole of them in a large kettle, or kettles, with the cider, and simmer it over a bed of coals till it is so thick, that it is with some difficulty you can stir it: it should be stirred almost constantly, with a wooden spaddle, or paddle, or it will be certain to scorch at the bottom or sides of the kettle. Shortly before you take it from the fire, season it as before directed, and then put it up in jars. [Bryan, Lettice, “Kentucky Housewife”, p375-377 (Shepard & Stearns::Cincinnati OH)]

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