Arrrgh!!!

Went to look over the applebutter recipe. It's much more complicated than what my grandmother made. She took some red and some yellow apples (Elder Brother swears that they were Jonathan and yellow delicious, but I think it was yellow transparent), added sugar and cinnamon. That was it. Because I was raised on Grandma's applebutter, no other applebutter tastes good to me.

Grandma made the flakiest biscuits. It was a challenge to get our biscuits, (freshly churned) butter, and apple butter to come out evenly on our plates. I didn't much care if I had some of one or the other left over because it gave me an excuse to take more of whatever was lacking!! I just found (more!) applebutter that is still awaiting consumption--that my mother made. As she died in 1994, you know it isn't fresh out of the kettle. I haven't eaten jams in over 25 years. What gets used goes into cooking. I also have some of Mom's frozen strawberry and peach jams. The last jars that I've opened still tasted good.

CopCar, my recipe for apple butter is simpler than this, too. But, I was thinking that I might make two batches and see how I like the new recipe compared to the simpler one.

It's amazing that your mother's apple butter and jam have stayed fresh so long. I don't tend to eat a lot of jam, simply because I don't think of it, but every now and then it calls to me. Raspberry and apricot jams go into Christmas cookies here, so we always have some on hand.

Mom's jams would have tasted better had they been consumed in an earlier year, but they are still good. We rarely, rarely have bread of any sort with our meal, unless we are having soup and sandwich as our lunch (very infrequently). Without a bread/biscuit/corn bread...who needs jam? I do make the thumbprint cookies, or some of the Serbian bar cookies, on occasion (as in, once every 10 Christmases--lol). Let us know how your applebutter turns out using the new recipe.

When I was working in LA in 1983 or 1984, I drove up to Tehachapi to pick peaches. Not knowing how to make peach preserves (which would have been my preference), I just used Grandma's applebutter recipe with the peaches. It was good stuff--but, it took me about 15 years to get it all eaten. (What's the point of canning one or two jars?) Bogie and Dudette make good applebutter--using their great-grandmother's recipe.

Isn't part of the reason for preserving produce the fact that there used to be lots of people to feed? Now that families are much smaller there is hardly the need to do much Bottling (Canning, you would say). Just two people or so in a family eat less, and nowadays eat differently.

That's true, Adele, but in our generation there are memories of recipes that can only be achieved with home canning. The chili sauce is a good example. I'm sure my mother feels the same about the Damson plum jam, even though you can get plum jam in a lot of stores.

Several of the women whose blogs I read are canning summer produce. Perhaps they save on the cost of food, or they may need to ensure there are no additives. So there are good reasons to "bottle" even though times have changed.

When I was a kid (could we just shorten that to WIWAK--since I use it so much--lol), we canned in order to be able to eat through the winter. We could not have afforded to buy food for our family (and my grandmothers were in the same boat). We were pretty poor. Almost everyone we knew was poor, if not really poor. (And, just as in UK, things were rationed.) In addition, the available commercially canned foods were not all that easy to find if one strayed beyond corn, beans, and peas. And, as Buffy says, we grew to prefer the taste of our own home canned goods.

Now, we preserve mostly to suit our individual tastes. Elegant Friend's salsa is the best salsa I've ever eaten, for instance; so, we shall have fun putting up about 2 dozen pint jars of it, tomorrow. On occasion, I preserve a few pints of something that we've over-bought, just to keep from wasting the food. (That's why I canned a few 1/2-pints of apples last fall.)

BTW: Home freezers became widely available at about the same time television receivers became widely available--mid- to late-1950s. Once we moved to Kansas City, we were only 6-8 blocks from a place that rented frozen food lockers. We would prepare about 100 chickens, every spring, for freezing. One had to plan ahead, however; not only to be able to go pick up the frozen food one wished to serve, but to allow time for the food to thaw. The lockers were kept at -10 degrees F (-23 degrees C?) or lower.

During WWII, it was the norm to have a Victory Garden, and I think that everyone who had one canned to provide food during the winter. My father learned gardening from his mother, and I'm sure my family had a small plot. I think most families had to be self-sufficient about augmenting the available food.

Good luck with the salsa, Cop Car!