Apple butter and Snitzing parties

Since many apples were required to make apple butter by the Germans in Pennsylvania, the neighbors would gather to help with the work. Snitz (dried apple slices) was added to cider and cooked down into apple butter or eaten as delicious Schnitz un knepp. Click images to enlarge.

"Apple Butter" in The Farmers' Cabinet. Philadelphia: 1838--

Being at the house of a good old German friend in Pennsylvania, in September last, we noticed upon the table what was called apple butter; and finding it an agreeable article, we inquired into the modus operandi in making it.

To make this article according to German law, the host should in the autumn invite his neighbors, particularly the young men and maidens, to make up an apple butter party. Being assembled, let three bushels of fair sweet apples be pared, quartered, and the cores removed. Meanwhile let two barrels of new cider be boiled down to one-half. When this is done, commit the prepared apples to the cider, and henceforth let the boiling go on briskly and systematically.

But to accomplish the main design, the party must take turns at stirring the contents without cessation, that they do not become attached to the side of the kettle and be burned. Let this stirring go on till the liquid becomes concrete-in other words, till the amalgamated cider and apples become as thick as hasty pudding-then throw in seasoning of pulverized alspice, when it may be considered as finished, and committed to pots for future

This is apple butter and it will keep sweet for very many years. And depend upon it, it is a capital article for the table -- very much superior to any thing that comes under the name of apple sauce.

“Farming Half a Century Ago” in The Fruit-Grower 1907:

Harvest time generally lasted four weeks, as then farm machinery was unknown. The farm hands were on hand as early as 4:30 in the morning, feeding the farm stock before breakfast, when the old fashioned country luncheon of Deutscher balle kase, home made sausage and ham and eggs, with all the Schwenkfelder cakes and Moravian rusks they could eat.

After such a repast they could well work until the 9 o'clock lunch. When that old farm house bell which was fastened to a twenty foot pole beside the old fashioned country home, rung forth its peels of command, calling the harvest folks to the dinner table, they had such an appetite that they could relish the old-fashioned bread which the grandmother of fifty years ago, baked in the old country oven. This was the primitive hearth bread, which at the present day is seldom seen on the farms of the eastern states. Women are few indeed nowadays who can bake such monster loaves that one piece cut across the same was all a man needed in connection with the other good things found on the farm house table.

“Besides the many reminders of those good old days," said an old grandmother, "is that wooden cider press, used to be called the 'community press,’ where we made sweet cider every week. The hydraulic press has taken its place but as they are widely scattered the farmers do not make as much cider, neither have they the good old apple butter in such great quantities as they had fifty years ago."

The apple butter party was another of the social events of the farm life of fifty years ago. First came what was termed the "snitzing party" where the women folks, old and young, gathered at the farmhouse the day before the apple butter was cooked. The sweet apples were peeled and sliced in quarters, all done with little knives, as, at this stage of elder making and apple butter cooking, the apple parer was unknown. After all the apples were sliced, a lunch was served, and the party disbanded only to be ready

the next evening to attend the ‘cooking party,’ where the same crowd of women folks were on hand and in addition all the farmers and their sons of the neighborhood baked bread, which was always found in great quantities on the banquet table which was set for the gathering who had congregated at the old farm house. After the lunch was served and the last crock was tied up with a newspaper covering, and carried to the farm house attic, where it remained until it was required, all were ready for a grand old time.

The large barn floor was cleared, and Joe, the fiddler, was perched upon an old barrel, and with the fiddle stick flying from east to west and his head going from north to south, he kept up such a racket on the old fiddle that the twenty or thirty couples, kept on dancing the old Virginia reels, Fisher's hornpipe and the Kutztown jig until late at night, when of course every fellow saw that his girl reached her home safely, only to wish that farmer Schantz, or farmer Adams, would call an apple butter party next Monday night. They could not come too often.
“Farming Half a Century Ago” in The Fruit-Grower. November, 1907.St. Joseph, MO


Many blog posts on apples: cider press 1778, 1800 US, 1850 UK, Germany 1840; Snitz, Roasted apples street sellers 1804, 1820; Storing in Federal US; Recipes and games HERE

Images and Descriptions of apple butter making process and parties: Heilman, S. P. The Old Cider Mill. Read before The Lebanon County Historical Society February 17th, 1899. Historical Papers and Addresses of the Lebanon County Historical ..., Volume 1. 1898-1901 p209-245.
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