Old-Fashioned Apple Buttering

Community connection you can spread on toast (and a yoga nidra for the heart chakra)

A couple years ago I made pear butter from scratch for the first time. My neighbor’s trees were laden, so I persuaded some friends who were visiting from the city to help me pick and then went home to process the bounty. I quickly learned why fruit buttering is traditionally done outdoors - all that molten sugar really loves to stick to a stove. But it was absolutely worth it, the late-fall flavor still holding out in a few remnants tucked into the back of my pantry, sense memory in a jar.

This August, at a retreat, a new friend, “C”, showed up with a few home-canned offerings of her own: soup, sauerkraut, and most memorably, her family’s proprietary apple butter made “the old-fashioned way”, cooked into a rich concentrate and flavored with cinnamon oil. It was the perfect accompaniment to buckwheat pancakes at breakfast the next morning. C watched the non-Appalachians with a critical eye. “You need to put more on there,” she said more than once. “There’s no point being stingy.” And she was right, in so many ways. When someone spends hours picking fall’s fruit and then hours more over a fire and then still more hours canning the stuff, and then freely offers it, that act of generosity deserves to be received with gratitude and joy, honoring the effort through heartfelt appreciation. I dare you to try putting a gratuitous amount of really good apple butter on homemade buckwheat cakes and not feel at least a teeny bit hopeful about the state of the world.

Then, a few weeks back, I got an email from C inviting me to come help out with the community apple buttering. This time, I got to take a turn stirring a giant pot with a wooden paddles over an open wood fire among a group of strangers who, if they were surprised to see a random newcomer in yoga pants - I was coming straight from class, and yes, I absolutely stuck out like a sore thumb - didn’t show it.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of cooking apple butter the old-fashioned way, let me tell you: it’s actual work. The thick, bubbling puree has to be kept moving at all times to prevent burning; if something burns, there’s really no saving the batch. Someone has to be on hand to watch the fire, making sure it’s not too hot and not too cold. You fall into a bit of a meditative rhythm, stirring. Eventually someone taps you on the shoulder and takes over. Apple buttering on a large scale isn’t a solo operation. Eventually, little spoonfuls are tested on a plate to ensure enough liquid has cooked out - in the days before refrigeration, a hastily-prepared batch of apple butter cooked for too little time would quickly go bad, ruining all that effort and all those apples. You take your time. You take turns. You give elbow grease and heart.

In an unplanned turn of events, I’m writing the last bit of this post in candlelight: the power is out at the house, and the already dark and quiet late-fall landscape has found another dimension of stillness. Sure, a tether to my phone’s hotspot and a fully-charged laptop mean I haven’t exactly traveled back to pre-electric Appalachia, but I’m still, in a small way, again transported to an earlier - but not yet bygone, at least in these parts - era. One where time is measured in the space between harvest and pint jar, community connection by the folks who show up to stir the pot and tend the fire, and loving generosity by the sweet spoonful.

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Below: a yoga nidra for the heart, in the dark and quiet season + the audio version of this post

Post audio:

Yoga nidra:

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