Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> "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
>
>
There's no way you are going to duplicate a memory of Grandma, but it's
nice of you to try. I suggest the public library, or:
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/csmonito...cedsearch.html
Hint: use the web archive to look up the article abstracts, then go to
the library with the information to find the actual articles.
Bob