Apple Butter

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Apple Butter contains no butter. It is a fruit spread usually made from apples, apple juice or cider, spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or cloves, and sugar (though sugarfree versions are also made.) As apples contain a large amount of pectin, which thickens the spread, additional pectin is generally needed only for quicker recipes that don't have the long, slow-cooking times needed to release the natural pectin. Generally, the apples are enough cooked slowly for a long enough time so that they fall to moosh by themselves, or they are sieved or food processed.

Apple Butter can be light or quite dark, depending on whether white sugar or brown sugar is used, whether some molasses has been added, and whether the apples were cooked in their own juice, or in added apple juice or apple cider. The resulting product is bottled and then processed in a boiling water bath for preserving.

If you make a sugarfree version of Apple Butter, you must really increase the processing time of your jarred Apple Butter in the boiling water -- about double the time of sugared Apple Butter, to be safe. The doubled processing time is needed to compensate for the missing preservative powers that the sugar would have given.

Commercial versions are available.

Apple Butter is more widely known in North America than it is in the UK.


Literature & Lore
"Thanksgiving turns thoughts to the foods stemming from old-fashioned kitchens. Such a one is apple essence, a dark-brown spread typical of the Pennsylvania Dutch apple butter known fifty years ago. The essence is made with freshly milled cider with the finest of apples. One cooking requires twenty-seven gallons of fresh cider pressed from ten bushels of apples. Four bushels of apples are sliced, these cooked with skin and seeds, then strained to make a purée which is added to the boiled cider; one bushel of apples is needed to make a gallon of spread.

Making a fourteen-gallon batch of the essence is a day-long job. By six in the morning a wood fire is roaring under the old-fashioned thirty-gallon kettle in which the cider is waiting. This is boiled down to half its original quantity, then the applesauce added and for six hours the mixture is stirred, and constantly, by means of an old-time wooden paddle with a ten-foot handle. After that the sugar is added, for this the dark-brown, a half pound per gallon. Then the sampling begins to determine the proper consistency. By late afternoon the essence is finished and packed into glass jars to keep indefinitely, if given the chance." -- Paddleford, Clementine (1898 - 1967). Food Flashes Column. Gourmet Magazine. November 1947.

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