Nothing personifies autumn quite like the sweetness and spice of fresh apple butter. The name is deceiving, as there’s actually no butter in it at all. Apple butter is really more of a thick jam.
A few weekends ago, my wife, step-son, and a family friend whipped up a batch of this delicious spread in the kitchen.
ap·ple but·ter
A paste of spiced stewed apple used as a spread or condiment.
Cinnamon sticks, cardamom, and cloves were pounded into smaller pieces with a hammer and combined in bags made of cheesecloth. These will be later boiled in a large pot with the cut apples to produce the spicy ambrosia.
The apples, fresh from the orchard, are then washed, sliced, and boiled until soft.
After boiling, the apples are forced through a food mill (as you can see, this one is ancient) that reduces the flesh and the skin of the apple into an applesauce-like paste.
The apple paste is then combined with sugar, two of the spice packets we made earlier, and boiled for a few hours. The fragrance of this is every bit as good as you imagine it to be. Imagine the scent of about ten apple pies baking in the oven at once.
After a couple of hours of boiling the apple and spice mixture has thickened (we don’t use any pectin to thicken) and gets darker from the spices infusing in the apple paste. We then ladled the mixture into canning jars and placed the jars upside down on a towel so the lids sealed.
This, labor intensive process, is calming and gives you an appreciation for what was a part of life for our ancestors. There’s something so rewarding about looking at those jars, enjoying the apple butter on fresh bread with a little grass fed butter, or giving it away as a gift and knowing it was made with your very own hands.
This particular recipe is a family secret, so I can’t share it, but there are plenty of recipes to be found on the internet with a quick search.
I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into one of our autumn traditions!
(All photos are original.)
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