On Wednesday, we went apple picking with an uncle, a niece, a daughter and two young grandchildren. It was the usual happy chaos of multiple generations with minds of their own.
We picked one bushel of Paula Red apples, and only Paula Reds. Sherrod uses these just as his mother, Emily Campbell Brown, did to make 25 or so jars of applesauce. Always, he uses her recipe. As he remembers it. (More on that in a moment.)
We were in the county of my husband’s childhood, so I heard the bundled recollections of baled hay and milked cows. Guernseys not Holsteins, and if you think there’s no difference please wait until I’m within hearing distance before saying that to Sherrod.
On this trip, Sherrod’s storytelling pivoted to that dusty, hot day when he was 16 and driving a full load of hay on a country road and the brakes on his tractor failed. He screamed his way through a busy intersection at U.S. 42 — “Look out! Look out!” — and survived to say to me yesterday, “It was the closest I’ve ever come to dying.”
I first heard that story shortly after we met, and I remember laughter in the telling. Twenty-one years later it landed differently as we looked at each other and thought about what might never have been.
Apple Hill Orchards has two rows of old wagons lined up outside its store, in case people picking their own apples need a little help dragging them back to their cars. One was a Berlin Flyer with red wooden slats on the sides, and it reminded me of the red Radio Flyer wagon I had when I was a child.
I’m the oldest of four. I was six years old when Chuckie, the youngest and only boy, was born. I once wrote in a magazine essay that my parents had a marching band on the porch to welcome home their first and only son. I was joking, of course, but Mom was annoyed with me. “You know we didn’t have that kind of money,” she said, without a trace of irony.
My dad bought the wagon so that I could pull Little Chuckie around the neighborhood. That’s what we called him. “Keep Little Chuckie safe,” Dad cautioned, “and no running when he’s in the wagon.”
This was an unnecessary note of caution. “Little” Chuckie weighed over 10 pounds when he was born. By the time I was anointed to be his mule, he weighed at least twice that and I became the only eight-year-old in the neighborhood with calves the size of Bocce balls.
Keep your brother safe.
I tried. He’s been gone four years now.
I thought about that as I stood next to that red Berlin Flyer, suddenly still and quiet. That’s how the mind works, as you know. No stopping its winding detours. Then I heard the laughter of our grandchildren running back from the orchard, followed closely behind by Sherrod who was lugging two bags of apples and shouting, “Next, we make the applesauce!” Rescued, yet again.
For many of our 19 years of marriage, Sherrod has made applesauce in late summer or early fall. Six years ago, the grandchildren started helping, in their way. Some of them really get into cranking the food mill. Lots of grunts and groans, as if they were demolishing a strip of highway. The younger ones like to taste it, at every stage. They have their regrets.
My job, as determined by me, is to photograph these messy endeavors and breathe in the life of it all. Our kitchen, my rules.
I mentioned that Sherrod uses his mother’s recipe for applesauce. Here it is, as he wrote it:
Making applesauce is really pretty easy. I don't use a written recipe. Just core the Paula Red apples with my nifty little coring thing, put the slices in a fairly large pot, and don't – repeat don't – take the skins off. Add three or four cups of water, and maybe a third of a cup of raw cane sugar and cook it on high heat until the skins separate or the apples reach a kind of mushy quality.
Turn the heat off and let it sit for a while. And then hand crank, and hand crank, the applesauce maker. Unless you want to spend most of the day making 30 or 40 pints of applesauce, it might be best to have two pots going at once.
Let me know if you try this one. Feel free to share your own recipes for applesauce in the comments.
Autumn is coming. I understand that’s a controversial statement.
My Moms parents were two displaced Eastern Europeans who briefly found each other. Having no nurturing themselves, they never figured out how to nurture a family, so Mom had no cultural or family traditions. She married my Italian Dad with the big family and bigger food. Food was love but also competition! There was no way she’d ever be known - like Rose for ricotta cheese cake, or Minnie for passatelli.
One fall, on a whim, she decided to make applesauce. Had never done so, but figured it out - she was a good cook by instinct - even if not Italian. Her brilliant vision was to leave it chunky and put in some cinnamon sticks. At that Sunday dinner, her applesauce was praised as an art form! Bellissima! It had to be at every celebration. No one could make it but her as we girls grew up to be schooled in applesauce art! She had her own special place in the family culinary culture!
Yes! How amazing is it that our thoughts amble from the present back into the past and then back to the present in the midst of family happenings. For me, the family cooking took place in my grandparent's kitchen with either my grandmother or grandfather overseeing making jars of grape and raspberry jellies. The grape vines and raspberry bushes had been planted in their back yard many years before I arrived on the scene and this canning was an annual activity for as long as they lived. Finally, thank you for sharing the story about your brother - as long as we have memories, those who no longer walk this earth still live.