Growing up, we had an enchanted orchard on our property.
I grew up on the side of a mountain in western Maryland, about an hour from both Baltimore and DC. Our driveway was an old stagecoach route, and the core of our home – the kitchen, the room above the kitchen (mine, eventually), and the dirt-and-stone basement – was 100 years old when I was little.
My childhood being what it was, I spent a lot of time alone, and some of that outside, wandering around the 11 acres of our (mostly) wooded property with a dog, a lot of ticks, and many copperhead snakes. We had a creek that ran through the property, minor rocky caves, and the above-mentioned orchard.
The orchard wasn’t much to look at. With just two each of neglected apple and pear trees, the harvest was uneven and unpretty. In the way of children, I don’t remember any pruning or care taken for that orchard, and I don’t remember any formal apple picking from that orchard. The apples and pears started out small and gnarly and grew more so as I got older, but if I had to guess at a memory I would say they were probably delicious in the way that only non-hybrid, heirloom, planted 30-years-before dwarf apple and pears can be. I took them for granted, I am sure, but I do remember pies, apple butter, and baked apples – the core hollowed out and stuffed full of nuts, raisins, cinnamon, and brown sugar and baked until the apples softened and combined with the sugar to release a syrupy ambrosia.
I remember dappled light streaming through the overgrown branches, the dampness of moss, and a constant hypervigilant awareness of the possibility of snakes. There was a moss-covered rock I spent time on, dreaming and staring out through the golden green undergrowth into the deepness of the rest of the woods.
Fast forward thirty years to five acres in Marietta in 2010 and a modestly larger group of five apple trees (plus six blueberry bushes and a peach tree that was mostly dead and only ever produced one rock-hard but perfectly delicious peach in our time there). Same unkempt branches. Same unlovely apples, but in abundance this time, weighing the branches so that in the fall I thought perhaps the pruning might take care of itself. These were Macintosh apples, I guessed, and covered with black spots that the interwebs assured me would not hurt me but just weren’t pretty to look at.
The squirrels sure loved the apples. They would sit high in the tree and take one bite, hurling them to the ground, often just as we walked by. If they had better aim things might be different, but as it stood then our orchard was littered through the late summer and early fall with half-eaten and partially rotted apples, bees, and the sickly sweet smell of decay.
Even with the squirrels doing their wasteful best, the apples the first year we moved to that house were abundant. I sent my horse’s hoof trimmer home with bags, and anyone else who wanted some, from the neighbor to the mailman to the UPS driver. And still there were too many.
In our urban environment now, there is no easy abundance of fruit – unless you look for it. Just one alley over there is a peach tree loaded with small, hard, but soon-to-be-delicious peaches. Two blocks away is an apple tree, pruned back hard last fall in anticipation of a house sale but coming back gangbusters with big apples. A sad little peach tree shares that yard as well, and an overloaded crabapple tree is just down the block in a pocket park off an alley.
Last week I nearly missed the apple tree down the block. I meant to go on Sunday morning but couldn’t quite drag myself out of bed, and when I passed it walking home from teaching yoga on Wednesday, nearly all the apples within sidewalk reach were gone. I don’t know what kind of apples these are – their texture is spongy and the flavor is tart apple essence rather than a big, bounding punch in the taste buds. But they might as well be my favorite kind – they have the terroir of Hampden, Baltimore. This could be a positive or negative, depending on your perspective, but for me, in many ways this tree brings me back to that enchanted orchard and makes me feel more connected to this city that I am still trying to love in spite of its trash and corruption and inequality. I can come to this tree in all of its stages – barren limbs, shy little buds, bursting flower, heavy with apples, gently drooping with the coming cold – and it brings me a similar peace that I felt in the glade on the side of the mountain in western Maryland.
This recipe is an easy solution to a beautiful abundance of fruit – apples, peaches, or pears. It couldn’t be easier, and you don’t need a stupid Instant Pot to do it. Allowing it to slow-cook overnight (or during the day while you’re at work) deepens the flavors, caramelizes the sugar, and produces a nuanced fruit butter unlike anything I have ever tasted.
Share it with your neighbors.
Neighborhood Slow-Cooked Apple Butter
(makes about four pints)
Ingredients
A dozen or so apples, about six pounds, peeled, cored, and chopped (see Recipe Notes)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg (freshly ground if you can)
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
hearty pinch of salt
Method
Place all ingredients in your slow cooker and stir to combine.
Let it cook on low for eight hours, or high for four to six. You sort of know when it’s done. Look for completely soft apples, like melted butter almost. If your slow cooker isn’t slow, keep an eye on it and watch for burning. If your apples are not very juicy, you can add a little apple cider (1/4 cup or so).
When the apples are cooked, use an immersion blender (if you have one) to blend until velvety smooth. If your apple butter is not a dark, luscious brown, it needs a little more time. You can let it cook on low for another hour or so.
If you don’t have an immersion blender, you can use a regular blender. Be mindful of lava scalding hot apple butter flying from the blender, though. That shit is deadly.
Recipe Notes
- Because the neighborhood apples were not as flavorful as I would have liked, about half of my most recent recipe was supplemented by Braeburn apples, which are a good crunchy combination of tart and sweet. Straight up pie apples require more sugar to make a proper apple butter than I would like to use, so go for a mix of sweet and tart. For god’s sakes, don’t use Red or Yellow Delicious.
- An apple peeler makes life so much easier. I use this one.
- This recipe can be preserved with canning. The USDA would prefer that you use a pressure canner, but I have canned this by ladling hot apple butter into clean, sterilized pint jars and boiling in a water bath for 15 minutes. If I don’t hear the pop of the lid, I eat it within two weeks, give it away, or freeze it. Some people add citric acid to deter bacteria, but I like to live on the edge.