"zxcvbob" > wrote in message
...
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > An older neighbor mentioned his grandmother made the best apple butter
> > from
> > a recipie she sent into the Christian Science Monitor (and was published
> > sometime around 1950-1954). I know it's a long shot but does anyone
> > have a copy of this? I've seen plenty of apple butter recipies, I know
this
> > one probably isn't much different than a lot of them, but I'd like to
make
> > up
> > a batch for him if I can find it.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ted
> >
> >
>
>
> The apples will make more of a difference than the recipe does. If you
> have to buy supermarket apples, Golden Delicious will probably work
> better than most readily available varieties unless you can find
> McIntosh. Don't be tricked into using Granny Smith; they cook about as
> bad as Red Delicious.
>

I only do applesauce in the fall. There's a big apple harvest out in Hood
River
(you can buy them for 45 cents a pound in 40 pound boxes if you drive out
there) and there's a local nursery of all places here in the city that puts
on a huge
apple sale and sells around 20 different varieties from local growers. The
apple cider they make is unbelievable.

> I have Barb's apple butter recipe here, as printed in _Edible Twin
> Cities_ magazine a couple of years ago. I can scan it and post it if
> you want (the recipe is simple enough, but the write-up that comes with
> it is quite lengthy and informative)
>

Well, I don't like apple butter myself (my wife likes it) I prefer
applesauce,
and I have used a number of different varieties of apples, even from the
supermarket when they have had really excellent sales (it happens a few
times a year) The why I do it is pretty basic. I fill a pan with quartered
apples (I
have a specific pan I use for this) with skins and put in a cup of water
then I put the
pan on simmer and let them simmer for as long as it takes for the apples
to turn into mush. Then I run the result through a Foley food mill. Then
I taste it and start adding sugar until the sugar and tartness is balanced,
then
I put in cinnamon to taste.

Its kind of the lazy man's way of making applesauce since I don't have to
bother with measuring anything and it works with most kind of apples. Of
course I'm sure that (with some varieties) dumping cup after cup of sugar
into the sauce to get the taste balanced utterly destroys any pretense of
making something "healthy" ;-) In any case, nobody else in my family likes
it, they prefer the store-bought stuff where it's just crushed apples, no
sugar, no spices no nothing, with a texture that tastes like raw apples
just milled down. (not the smooth melts in your mouth taste that I like)
Yuck!

From what I've seen with apple butter recipies, essentially apple butter is
just applesauce boiled down for a day or so. The problem is the spice
array in all the recipies for it is wildly different. While I'm sure that
Barbs
apple butter recipie tastes just great, it isn't going to taste like the one
from the CSM, and the entire point of the exercise is to see if I can
duplicate
the taste of the apple butter that the neighbor remembers from his youth.

Ted