THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 TAG: 9610150031
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LOVINGSTON, VA. LENGTH: 177 lines
APPLE BUTTER, well, at least the batches put up in jars for city folks to buy off the shelf, probably ought to carry a warning label. For their own sake. Something that would get their attention real quick. Something like . .
It's so good that if you put some on your forehead, your tongue will slap your brains out trying to get at it.
That's what country folks sometime say about apple butter. Sort of a joke. Folks here in apple country - I'm here in Nelson County southwest of Charlottesville, hard up against the eastern flanks of the Blue Ridge Mountains - mostly spread apple butter over fresh-baked biscuits or rolls where it belongs. Wouldn't waste it on their foreheads.
Funny thing, though. You might never imagine that apple butter could be anywhere as good as it is if you saw it being made. No more than you could imagine how good Smithfield hams taste looking at a pig pen.
But I've come up here because I have a particular bias. I think it just tastes better the closer you get to the source - like roadside peaches in Georgia, like oranges and fresh-squeezed juice in Florida.
Apple-butter-making happens in October. The rows of apple trees that in the springtime had covered these rolling hills in splendor with their white blossoms tipped in pink now stagger and stoop under their loads. The ground beneath each tree is carpeted with the windfalls from when Tropical Storm Fran blew through. Still, there are almost more apples than anybody knows what to do with.
You walk up on an apple-butter-making session, like here at the Drumheller Orchards, at, say, midmorning, and what you would see is a pair of smoke-blackened, 55-gallon copper kettles sitting over open hardwood fires with a couple of people at the end of long wooden paddles stirring, stirring, stirring as the rising steam mixes with swirling smoke. Everyone else is standing around, or sitting on apple crates, talking and waiting their turn at the end of the stirring sticks.
What they're stirring, the apple-butter-to-be, is not a particularly pretty sight at this stage. Depending on how long this operation has been going on, the thick liquid mass of apple pulp inside the kettles is somewhere between the yellow-green color of applesauce and a deeper brown, the color of caramel. Eventually it will run from brown to brick red, sort of like the Piedmont clay all around here.
It is bubbling and plopping and blopping and sometimes slopping over the rim of the kettle. It sort of reminds me of those nasty mud fumaroles you see at Yellowstone National Park, only it smells a whole lot better.
The stuff is hot enough to peel your hide off if it hits you. That's why these stirring sticks have such long handles and why the fire stokers are VERY careful as they approach the pots in a crouch.
If you think about it, though, you'll figure out that what they're working on in these big kettles, this apple-butter-to-be, has to turn out mighty good if these people are willing to work as hard as they have to to make it.
What they do, more often than not, is just make a big social event out of it. Apple-butter-making is a big event in the country, bigger even than hog killing in November, and a whole lot less noisy. That way, it's not work, it's fun.
People come from all over to help with the peeling and coring and mashing, which often begins before sun-up, and the stirring and the fire tending . . . and, after a long day, if they did help and if they're lucky, they might get to do some of the tasting.
It's tradition. It's part of their heritage, something these people and their families have been doing for generations. And they start early.
This cool morning, when the sky is the color of newsprint and threatening rain and the mountains are shawled in mist, teacher Ed McCann has his Nelson County High School Future Farmers of America club out here at Drumhellers, working the kettles. They'll bottle their apple butter at the end of this long day and sell it, hoping to make enough money to make a trip to some sort of agricultural get-together down in Georgia.
The Drumhellers, Darrell and Doris and their family, make the place available for the kids to learn.
And it's a social event, of course. In the packing shed, there are apples and apple products for sale, as well as pumpkins, hams, bacon and crafts. There's country music and cloggers, and there's a hayride up into the orchards, where the mountain views are impressive. And the kids, when they are not taking their turn, two by two, on the stirring sticks, are goofing around like kids will do.
What I learned, from McCann and the kids, from Darrell and Doris, and from some other people I talked to, is that there are about as many ways to make apple butter as there are people with enough stamina to take on the project.
Basically, apple butter is made by cooking apple pulp with sugar and adding flavoring, usually cinnamon and cloves. Apple butter - any fruit butter, for that matter - is different from, say, jelly in this way: jellies are the juice of fruit or berries boiled with sugar, sometimes with a thickener.
It's called apple butter because that's its consistency if you get it right.
Lots of people use copper kettles, but some insist that brass is better; others use a cast iron kettle, and some even use galvanized metal and cook on a stove top indoors.
Outdoors is best. You can use any kind of dry wood for the fire except pine. You can't let the wood touch the bottom of the kettle, because it will burn the butter.
The stirring stick should have a long, solid handle, and the part that dips into the kettle shouldn't be a wood with acid in it. Poplar is good for that.
Granulated sugar is the preferred sweetener because it's easiest to deal with. Some folks use sorghum; honey could be used, but it would take a heap of honey.
The only thing that everyone agrees on is that the butter must be stirred constantly. It'll stick if you don't. The preferred stirring method seems to be once on one side, once on the other, then once in the middle, but I suppose there are variations to that, too.
Darrell and Doris Drumheller sit on the front porch of their house on a knoll overlooking the packing shed and the orchards and the cooking activity. A flag with an apple on it flutters in a light breeze from a short staff attached to a porch column.
They're just watching today. They'll make their own commercial apple butter a little later - about 400 to 500 gallons, Darrell says.
``Only place I sell it is right here,'' he says, ``although I do ship some as far as Texas, to people who have come here and bought and wrote back asking for more.''
The Drumhellers have about 450 acres in orchards. He was born and raised right here. Their parents and their parents' parents raised apples and made apple butter. Their children and their children's children are now involved in the operation.
People don't always agree on what kind of apple to use in making apple butter. Tart is better than sweet because a tart apple ``cooks up'' better. Delicious, red or golden, don't cook up right, I'm told.
Darrell prefers the Stayman because ``it's a good applesauce apple, with a darker tint to it. It's a decent-looking apple when you fry it.''
Here's the way he goes about it. ``It's the way my mother and father made it, the way their mothers and fathers made it,'' Darrell says.
In a 50-gallon kettle - you will sometimes hear this word pronounced ``kittle'' in these parts - he puts in a gallon of cider for a starter, although ``you don't want too much, because what you're doing is cooking the moisture out of the apples.
Then you add the apples, ``sliced or quartered, after you peel and core them and get the husks and seeds out.
``You keep adding apples and adding apples and cooking and cooking and cooking until it goes into apple butter. It usually takes about 12 hours.
``The stirring is what kills you. From the time you put the first apple in until the end, you've got to stir.
``Over the years, we've got it down to a time schedule. Four to four-and-a-half hours after the last apples are added, you let the fires die down and add sugar to taste.''
Doris is the official Drumheller taster, for both sugar and spices. She says the rule of thumb is 2 to 2 1/2 pounds of sugar for every gallon. ``My mother always said three pounds per gallon,'' she says.
``When you add sugar,'' Darrell continues, ``it makes it soupy. So you build your fires back up to get the thickening right.''
Which is . . . ?
``You stick a big spoon in it and hold it up, upside down. If the butter stays there, it's right. Then you're ready for the spices.''
Doris says they use oil of cinnamon and oil of clove, the concentrated - and expensive - stuff.
``It takes more cinnamon than cloves,'' she says. ``We add it a few drops at a time and stir it in real good.
``When we think we're close, we kind of pass it around and see if anybody else wants to taste. Some way or another we get it right.'' ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTOS BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN
Members of the Nelson County High School Future Farmers of America
take a turn stirring the bubbling kettle of apple butter.
Orchard owner Darrell Drumheller, right, and friend Onyx Metz watch
the apple-butter-making.
Graphic
A LOOK BACK
Apple harvesting is a Virginia tradition that dates back to,
well, sometime after 1662, not to put too fine a point on it. That
was the year that Jamestown settlers grafted the first apple tree
root stocks they'd gotten from England with the native Virginia crab
apple trees.
And the rest is history.
Virginia's more than 300 commercial orchards produce an average
of 100 million bushels annually. That's sixth highest in the nation.
The most prevalent varieties are Stayman, Winesap, York, Rome,
Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Jonathan. At
Virginia packing houses, they all cost about $12 a bushel for grade
2, $14 for grade 1.
- Stephen Harriman
KEYWORDS: APPLE BUTTER by CNB