Its the end of October & at my station that means its time to make applebutter. It is a tradition now but we still sell as much as we can make and it is one of our biggest fund raisers. Some things have changed but some things about making "butter" never will.

The making/sales of applebutter started back in the 60s when the dept was first formed as a way to make money. Of course back then there were orchards all over the township & the apples were grown locally & much of them were donated. Canning jars were donated. Many of the other supplies were donated by local stores or each member brought sugar or cinnamon or jars. The ONLY thing that goes into the applebutter is apples, sugar & cinnamon. It was practically a whole department, month long preparation deal back then that included families & neighbors who wanted to support the fire department. In fact, my earliest memories of the FD are of playing with other members children while the adults were busy. Later I graduated to washing jars & babysitting until I was old enough to stir & wash & sterilize jars.

Members took cases of jars home to their wives or mothers to be cleaned & sterilized them or they were done on site in big wash tubs with a fire under them. Yeah, it was that long ago!! Then in 1973 the new fire station had a kitchen with a stove & sink !!

It is a huge process so there has to be food to feed the masses. Geeze, firefighters are always hungry!! So in the past, folks brought all kinds of food, chilli & soups & sweets, spaghetti & caseroles and snacks of all kinds. The coffee pot can never be empty.

There is wood to accumulate & split for the fire. The huge copper pots have to be cleaned with vinegar & salt & copper scrubbers. The paddles have to be sturdy & clean. Then the apples (bushels & bushels - 1 yr we made 60 bushel of butter) have to be peeled, quartered & cored. The apples have to be washed, then put through a grinder by hand so that the applesauce is put in 5 gal buckets (oh yeah they have to be cleaned too). And about 5 am, the applesauce goes into the kettles & the fires lit. Then it has to be stirred continuously until it is put in jars. It all makes for a very long day.

Some things have changed over the years. Its hard to believe that my husband & I are left knowing HOW to make applebutter, as in when to add the sugar, how much sugar to add and my main job now that the older women aren't around is HOW MANY JARS we need. Thats a process in itself & thank goodness I understand math. The Chief, the president, my husband & I sat down the other night to discuss what supplies we needed. We decided we should make more than we did last year so we figured out how much we could make by calculating the capacity of all our kettles. These days we use canned applesauce that we buy in bulk so we figured how many gallons of sauce we would begin with. It cooks down so you factor that in to calculate how much butter you will end up with. It is never precise because how much it cooks down depends on a lot of variables. But we came pretty close. Calculaitng how much sugar to buy is another issue. For many years my husband & I couldn NOT agree because he said it was so many cups per gallon & I said it was so many lbs. I did the math, it was the same, just different measurments.

Like I said, some things have changed. Since most of the farms are gone & there aren't many folks who do a lot of home canning, finding used canning jars isn't easy. It was necessary to purchase new jars so there isn't as much work in getting them ready. (I swear they bought more than I told them we needed & there were more cases of unused jars left over from last year than they told me there were. I knew I should have counted them myself)

But - although it rained Friday night, the weather cleared up & the kettles were put on about 6am on Saturday. It was still a very, very long day & I was so tired last night my toes throbbed & my back ached. My hands are still sore today from the bangs & cuts & bruises associated with hard work but I survived. (I have missed making apple butter 1x since I was 14 yrs old) It is sometimes grueling work especially since many of the younger generation who didn't realize just how much time & effort go into the process were either tired or had other things to do. Tired? A 20 yr old who's put in 4 hrs @ the station is Tired? Ok, so he works a 40 hr week.

EVEN THOUGH some of us have bulked in the past of using canned sauce instead of fresh apples, I really believe our applebutter is the best ever. I say that every year. :) Putting it in the jars is a messy job & of course some gets spilled down the side of the jar. I really eat applebutter once a year, licking my fingers as we are jarring it.
I have also graduated to the cinnamon taster. I get to taste a spoonful of the butter after the cinnamon gets stirred in. Oh for the love of a fresh home made biscuit & some warm, just out of the kettle applebutter!

For those of you who don't KNOW applebutter, maybe that is a regional thing too, this stuff is such a pretty color & so thick the spoon will stand up in the jar. YUM! Applebutter has been a staple around our family for as long as I can remember. Good ole' RVFD applebutter that is.

My nehew Austin is 12 yrs old now, so he was working yesterday making applebutter. When he was about 4 yrs old his grandfather came to my house in summer asking if I happened to have any RVFD applebutter left. I did have a couple of extra quart jars in the garage. He said that my nephew was crying because the applebutter was gone. They bought a jar from a church but it was runny & pink and Austin wouldn't eat it. They bought the cute little apple shaped jar @ the grocery store but Austin continued to insist that he needed "Aunt Jen butter". Some things never change, when he got a taste of what we made yesterday his eyes rolle up & he smiled & sighed. He is a true applebutter conisuer. When my son was about a yr old he asked me for a butter-butter sam'ich. I tried various combinations of peanut butter & other things but he continued to say butter-butter like Mamaw's. So I called my mom. Butter-butter is a combination of peanutbutter & applebutter.

These days there isn't as much profit to be made since we have to purchase ALL of the necessary ingredients and jars but we come out ahead and make a few hundred dollars instead of the $1,000 or more we used to make. But we have fun while we are working our butts off and to those of us who enjoy the "tradition" of it, it is worth a few aches & pains.

I know it is a tradition that will slowly but surely die out much like the water battles @ the fire prevention parade & happy hour after the regional fire school & the FISH FRYs & ice cream socials of the past have died. I can't help believing that we need to go back to some of our old ways like pot luck suppers, cake walks, Christmas craft bizars & helping each other out through difficult times or with special events in our lives that our little corner of the great big world would still be the best place to be.