Mary Otto. Copyright (c) Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to [email protected].
The expansive landscape of the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival on a recent fall Saturday set the scene: “Have you made your apple butter yet?” my daughter asked late in the afternoon as we walked toward her car.
It had been a luxurious day: abundant sun; weather warm enough for just a sweater; pens of aromatic sheep with thick coats; and wool merchants offering skein upon skein of multi-colored, naturally dyed yarn, felting kits, small weaving looms and hand-knit hats and mittens. Our food-truck lunch of farm-cured sausage on a bun was delicious, and we finished the outing with a traditional Vermont maple creemee.
For many years, my older daughter and I have shared a passion for yarn and fiber, along with a dedication to processing and preserving all that we can of nature’s bounty before winter arrives. But while she is truly flourishing in the worlds of fiber and food storage, I am modestly maintaining. Making apple butter, however, is another story. Making apple butter is always one fall project I am eager to get started on.
I love that my husband and I live near an old, established orchard. The short drive there, on a gravel road, whets my appetite not only for their apples, peaches and pears, but also for their cider and homemade doughnuts. On my visit there this week, I came home with the required 10 or so pounds of apples — Northern Spy, McIntosh, and Honey Crisp, as well as the cider called for in the recipe and, yes, a bag of doughnuts.
It was not long before the half-pint jam jars, purchased at the local hardware store, were lined up on my kitchen counter. I had also retrieved my usual recipe, and the several cooking pots I would need were close at hand, in a tall cabinet in the garage. Assembling them in the kitchen, I recalled that to a greater or lesser extent, each had a history, or at least an association with another place or another life.
The first and largest pot required for the project is known in our family as “the mother-of-all-pots.” It came from the Bridge Kitchen Store in Manhattan, likely purpose-bought for making apple butter back in our New York days. During years of young children and busy jobs, having the right pot simplified things. It has always been the right size to contain all of the quartered and cored apples to be boiled, and thick enough that the apples rarely stick to the bottom and burn. Said pot is 9 inches tall and 13 inches across, with a heavy copper bottom. Mercifully, I can still lift it from stove to counter when the boiling is complete.
After sieving the cooked apples through a conical strainer, the resulting apple sauce goes into another favorite pot, a very large, orange Le Creuset Dutch oven. In terms of my affection for it, it hardly matters that it is the replacement for my original Dutch oven. This newer version was purchased years ago in Paris at E. Dehillerin, after the first pot had developed a chip. The second pot calls up the years my husband and I lived in London, when we frequently visited Paris to touch base with a college-aged daughter working there and learning French. Over the years this Dutch oven too has become an essential part of making apple butter. It’s the ideal container to place into the oven for a couple of hours, to let the apple sauce thicken to a texture ready to ladle into jars to process in a water-bath canner.
That pot, navy blue in color and speckled with white, is fitted with a clever metal rack that holds my jars of apple butter as the water boils up around them. Ones like it have been used by women across decades if not centuries. Ultimately the contents of the jars will reach a temperature high enough that every one of them will seal. Some click audibly even as I lift the rack from the canner when the required time is up. My canning pot dates to my early years of marriage, but it could easily have come from the Midwestern kitchen of my mother or one of my grandmothers.
In fall, for me and for other women in my family, there has always been the ritual of apple butter. My heart lifts as I survey the jars, now labeled and tucked into their cardboard boxes, still sitting out on my kitchen counter. And it lifts even higher when I picture giving away the first jar, now missing from the box. It was the one I handed to my granddaughter, living nearby for the year, when we went together to a local event. The thought occurs to me that in time, she might join in this fall ritual. If she did and if we still lived near each other, I could easily hand her the cooking pots needed for the job.
Mary K. Otto, formerly of Norwich, lives in Shelburne, Vt. Readers may email her at [email protected].
