Marie Cathillon raised five children on the farm in Le Petit-Courty. I imagine Marie’s Pantry stocked with wild and cultivated herbs used for cleaning and seasoning. Long before chemicals, eco-friendly housekeeping was the only alternative.
The characters Francisca, Marie, and even Aunt Agnes are loosely based on my family and my experiences. In this picture, my mother’s family is making apple butter in an outside pot on her family farm in rural Western Pennsylvania, just as I envisioned the cooks making things in Marie’s pantry in Le Petit-Courty during the Renaissance.
Making Apple Butter for Marie’s Pantry
Photo courtesy of Teri Meier
Every autumn, when I was a kid in Western Pennsylvania, when the leaves changed and the air grew crisp, our family gathered for the long-standing tradition of making apple butter. It was more than a chore—it was a two-day celebration. I don’t remember all of the work. I do remember occasionally sneaking an apple slice or two, the camaraderie, the smell of the cooking apples, and scraping out the big pot of the sticky, dried-on apple butter after all the work was done.
The first day, we’d start peeling and coring bushels of apples. After cooking, I was allowed to help run the apples through the sieve to make sauce, which would be poured into a big wooden barrel, and we were done for the night.
The next day, Grandpap would tend the fire under the copper kettle. Once the sauce, sugar, and cinnamon were added to the pot, my aunts would stir the mixture constantly with a long wooden paddle as the apples simmered down into a dark, delicious spread. The day stretched on with Grandma fluttering about, making lunch, cleaning up the sauce, and preparing the jars, and Grandpap adding another log to the fire, smoking his pipe, and telling stories.
By the time the sun dipped behind the hills, our clothes smelled like smoke and cinnamon, and the apple butter was thick and glistening. We’d fill jar after jar, sealing in the warmth of the day. Then came the reward: warm bread slathered with fresh apple butter and eaten on a piece of crusty bread with a bowl of soup on a cold winter day.
It always felt like more than food—it was memory, love, and effort you could taste. That yearly ritual connected us to each other, to the land, and to all the generations who had stirred that same kettle before us.
The memories featured in Marie’s Pantry are the vision I tried to recreate in Le Petit-Courty, as featured in the book From the Drop of Heaven.
