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Apple Butter!

Last Saturday we made the trek to Webster Springs to participate in the annual making of apple butter. We first participated last year and had such wonderful time. I think the best part about making apple butter is you get to spend about 5 hours with many generations of family, hearing stories, sharing your own, and it is a day focused not on cooking, but on togetherness. This year was no exception.

Patrick spent the entire time outside with the apple butter crew. I was in charge of the food/kitchen since it is so hard for me to stand outside in the damp weather with my fibromyalgia. I got to spend some great quality time with my sister-in-law. Julia and Morgan vascilated between indoors and out, checking the progress of the apple butter and playing with a new friend.

I thought it would be fun to post the process that the Tenneys use to make apple butter. I have learned from others that there are many ways to do so (both inside and outdoors), but this is how we do it in Webster Springs, WV...

Step 1: Take one clean, large, copper pot. Make sure it is level so your apple butter doesn't slop out when you stir.

Step 2: Pour in defrosted applesauce (previously made by hand). I think we used 10 gallons.

Step 3: Find really weird looking fork thingy to stir the apple sauce (to keep it from burning).

Step 4: Make sure your fire STAYS lit, and that it is adequately big enough to boil the applesauce, but not so big that it comes up over the bottom of the copper pot.


Step 5: You stir the boiling applesacue.

And stir......

Add many pounds of sugar and stir some more...


Until the applesauce has boiled down to a consistency you like (we like ours thicker than runny, but thinner than paste)

Step 6: Add in cinnamon dots candy to turn apple butter from yellowish to red.

Step 7: Find two strong men to remove copper pot from over fire to canning area.

Step 8: Add in 7 vials of cinnamon flavoring (not pictured).

Step 9: Get your canning assembly line ready, jars and lids out, and start filling jars!


Step 10: After as much of the apple butter has been scooped from the copper pot and canned (we got 73 pints this year!!), you may eat the remaining apple butter directly from the pot.

And at the end of a very long but fruitful day, you sit on the couch with your great-grandmother and cousin and listen to a story.