"A" is for Applebutter . . .

"And the Moabitess said unto Naomi,

Let me now go to the field,

and glean ears of corn after him

In whose sight I shall find grace.

And she said unto her, Go, my daughter."

Ruth 2:2  KJV





Cooking the apples

"A" is for 'Applebutter.'  And as a member of Mooresville Friends Meeting I just have to include 'applebutter' in my Quaker Alphabet!

September is applebutter time at Mooresville Friends! The smell of apples and applebutter fills the air from the basement up into the Meetingroom, Sunday School rooms, library and offices. This sweet aroma lasts for weeks. During the month members and a few attenders, both ladies and men, spend time down in the basement of the Meetinghouse making applebutter and sharing in fellowship.





USFW ladies cutting apples

For the last several years our work days have been Saturdays and Mondays for two weekends. At times in the past this group of dedicated workers have worked three or four - three day weekends to get enough applebutter made. The first group begins arriving about 7am on Saturday morning. Jars need to be washed, the apples rinsed, cut and cooked down - we'll have up to three large pots cooking at one time. Everyone has a job to do - some come early just to cut the apples, others come later to help with the canning and processing, some only on Saturday as they work during the week.

Mixing





Saucing

Once the apples have cooked down it's time to sauce them. Thanks to Kenny, one of our members, this part of the process was made easier when he added an electric motor to it (Kenny also added a motor to his ice cream maker - now that was fun to watch!). The sauce for each batch is measured out and put into a five gallon bucket where the spices are then added and mixed . . . thanks goes out to Phil who came up with a way to do this mixing with an electric paint mixer. Once the spices have been mixed in the sauce, the mixture is poured into one of the cookers where it cooks for several hours until it thickens. A normal Saturday has us using four cookers with four or five cookers going on Monday.

 

Unloading the canner

When the applesauce has reached the right consistency, and that isn't always an easy consensus to reach, it's time to start the canning process. A bit of tasting happens around this time - each cooker full needs to be tasted, by more than one Friend of course, for quality control! Time to get the applebutter ladled into the jars, clean the tops of the jars, put on the lids & rings and process in a hot water bath. Once the jars have been processed they are lined up on the counter to cool down. The 'pings' that follow are music to our ears! 

 

We seemed to have had quite
a crew of the men this morning!

On a typical Saturday we will process somewhere between 6 - 6 1/2 bushels of apples, into sauce, and process about half of that into applebutter which nets about 100 pints. In addition, there are 4-5 buckets of spiced sauce that are put in the refrigerators for Monday. On Monday two workers will show up about 7am - getting the buckets out of the refrigerators and pouring the sauce into the cookers to begin cooking down. Other workers show up a bit later to help stir, can and process the applebutter. On Monday there's less work to do, so less workers are needed and we typically will can fewer jars, so we might only get around 80 pints. All total the last couple of years we've been shooting for around 400 total pints. Sometimes we will also fill about a dozen half-pint jars, some are given away and others might be found in some of the gift baskets at the Bazaar.

Usually the next day someone will come in and check to make sure the jars have all sealed, wipe them off, add labels and box them up.

I sat down with a couple of Friends over lunch this last Wednesday and had a bit of a phone conversation with yet another Friend this afternoon,  and asked some questions to help me fill in some of the blanks in this post - these were interesting conversations which maybe raised a few more questions than they answered. Hard to answer questions for things that happened 'before your time.' So many of the Friends that may have been involved in this project, and know more of the beginning history of it, are no longer with us to ask, and there would be a lot of digging to do to try and get all the answers. So, here's a bit of what I did find out:



We try and have
a bit of fun

Applebutter has been a project of the Mooresville USFW (United Society of Friends Women) since the late 1930's or early 1940's. So there is a lot of tradition behind this project.

 

Originally it was cooked in a big black iron pot over a fire out in the parking lot and stirred with a big wooden paddle. Very limited quantities were made at that time and everyone came to help.

 

The applebutter is made in September and sold at our annual USFW Fall Bazaar the first weekend in November.

The proceeds from the applebutter, and Bazaar, have been used by the Mooresville USFW to support missions/projects of USFWI (the 'I' being the International Society) and some local missions/projects of Mooresville Friends Meeting USFW over the years.
 

I really wanted to know "how" the  USFW got started making applebutter, specifically. That question really involved some best guesses. The thought is that at that time members of the Meeting owned a local apple orchard, so apples were easily available. Another thought that came up in our conversation was that making applebutter is a rather labor intensive process and does require some special equipment that not every household, then or even now, would have. So applebutter seemed like a good project.
 

It's a multi-day, multi-week effort to produce hundreds of pints of this yummy topping . . . good on a slice of fresh bread, toast or biscuits (muffins perhaps for my European Friends?). Once you've tasted this yummy treat you'll be back for more.

I personally started helping make applebutter seven or eight years ago now - and I've done just about every job except cutting the apples . . . I just don't get up that early! I can tell you that once you've helped it hard not to go back year after year and help again.

It's truly a labor of love!

Some of the workers