I just had a ‘croissant’ for breakfast...with home made apple butter and coffee. Apple butter is a comfort food for me. Not the store-bought stuff that tastes vaguely cinnonamy and about as apple-like as mock apple pie, but the real stuff. Well, as close to the real stuff as we c’n get today. We go to Apple Hill and buy boxes of apples and Millyrose cooks ‘em up on the stovetop the way my Mother did in her later years.
But the apple butter I grew up with was cooked outside in a big iron kettle by my Grandma Smith ‘n I couldn’t begin to tell you her recipe altho’ I would if I could. I think the world’d be a better place if everyone would go public with all their old ‘secret’ family recipes so that the world could have a continuity of comfort-food memories.
‘Course, I can’t imagine my Grandma Smith having a croissant for breakfast. ‘N if she ever would, she’d ‘a called it a crescent roll. Nosirreebob, she had her apple butter on a biscuit the way God intended it to be eaten.
And Grandpa would ‘saucer’ his coffee. It was black and strong and hotter’n......well, you know. Anyway, that’s how I learned to drink coffee in the first place. Hot and black and sipped out of a saucer. I think some traditions need to fall away with the passage of time ‘n that was prob’ly one of them.
My friend, Mollie Burke Phillips, has a new liver and I hear she’s doing well. I only mention this becuz’ until she got too sick a couple years ago, Mollie cooked apple butter every fall. Outside. In a big iron kettle. The way God intended it to be cooked. And yeah, I have a selfish reason for praising Mollie’s apple butter. I’d simply like to have some more of it.
Merry Christmas to whoever’s bored enuff to read this blog...........Justin Other Smith
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