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 would gather 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, my aunts and family friends would gather in my grandmother’s basement. This image is the closest I could find to the oven she had, used only for canning and preserving.
I’d watch the ladies peeling and coring bushel after bushel of apples. After my hundredth question about why apples float, why they don’t save the seeds to plant (there were thousands of them), and other irritating questions, I was handed a long-handled wooden spoon to stir the big pot of sauce. Occasionally, I was allowed to help run the apples through the sieve, turning the pestle round and round, watching the apple goo squish through the little holes.
Once the sauce was made, it would be poured into a wooden barrel that stood as tall as I did. 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, everyone took turns stirring 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. Grandpap would add another log to the fire, smoke his pipe, and tell 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: all the children were given a spoon to scrape the sticky residue from the copper pot. I still remember the thick gooey goodness. It always felt like more than food—it was memory, love, and effort you could taste. That yearly ritual connected us to the land and to all the generations who had stirred that same kettle before us.
