Stirring the Kettle: Apple Butter and Gospel at Eden Church

Stirring the Kettle: Apple Butter and Gospel at Eden Church

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

I’ve been eating Eden Church apple butter since I was a little kid, and I now carry an AARP card. In all that time, I’ve never had a bad jar. It’s just that good. If you’ve had it, you know. If you haven’t, this is your year.

Apple butter is more than something you spread on a biscuit. Long before refrigerators, it was how Appalachian families kept the fall harvest from going to waste. They cooked bushels of apples down low and slow in a big kettle until they had something that would last through the winter. It was never a one-person job. Neighbors came. Somebody kept the fire going. Everybody took a turn at the paddle, and the stirring went on for hours. An apple butter boil was a gathering as much as a chore. In a lot of places it still is.

Eden Church has been doing it a long time.

“It actually started out in the McAllister family’s backyard in 1947, I think,” Joyce Ryder told me. “And it’s gone to the church, and we’ve had many, many years of fundraisers with apple butter.”

This year’s batch came together from October 11 through October 14. I didn’t ask Joyce for any trade secrets, because some things a church ought to keep. But she was glad to walk me through the work. It’s still a lot of work, she said, just not as much as it used to be.

“We used to peel apples by hand,” she said. “Now they have machines that do that, that crush the apples, and they strain the apples, and then they go into the pot. We’ve got automatic stirrers now, where we used to have hand stirs.”

The applesauce cooks down the first day. The second day is when it becomes apple butter.

“That’s when all the spices and the good stuff is added to it, and it takes a few hours for it to cook down,” she said. Once it comes off the kettles, it goes straight to the jars. “We have a whole assembly line of ladies there who are ready to jar that apple butter.”

The ladies had plenty to jar. Eden Church made 160 gallons of apple butter this year, sold in quarts for $12 and pints for $8. Joyce said the pre-orders went well. She didn’t have the final count yet, because the church usually tallies everything after it’s all said and done. A good bit of that 160 gallons has already gone home with folks, but not all of it.

“We will have some for Saturday to sell,” she said. “Anybody that didn’t get it can still get it.”

Saturday is the Eden Church Apple Butter Gospel Sing, and this year the music has a different feel to it. In years past, Joyce said, the church brought in groups from outside the county. This time they decided to stay close to home.

“This year, we decided that we were gonna ask local groups,” she said. “And so we have lots of local groups. All the names that you just named are special people, and we hope that their followers will come out and listen to them.”

The lineup reads like a roll call of Bath County’s church music: Eden Church; John Young and Wayne Winebriner; Healing Springs Baptist Church with Melanie Baughn and the choir; Frank and Kathy Johnson; Faith Covenant Church with Sarah and Roy Burns; and Hot Springs Presbyterian Church with Karen and Richard Hise. One more name on that list belongs to Joyce’s own family. Her granddaughter, Haley Woodzell, will be singing too. When I asked if that made her a little proud, she didn’t have to think about it.

“Absolutely.”

The singing moves indoors this year, and Joyce wanted people to know they won’t need to haul a lawn chair.

“It’s gonna be inside the church in the sanctuary, nice comfy seats,” she said. “You don’t have to bring a chair, sit out in the yard, in the sun or in the air or whatever. It’ll be just a beautiful day with a lot of songs going on, and the groups will go one after the other, from 10 until 2.”

There’s more to the day than music. The ladies of the church will have food for sale, prepared, as Joyce put it, “by the wonderful hands of our ladies in the church.” Vendors will be set up for anyone who wants to browse. And work by local students will be on display and judged in the children’s art contest, which drew more than 30 entries this year.

Joyce made a point of thanking the folks who help make it all possible.

“It’s always a blessing for us that we are supported by the Bath County Arts Association,” she said, “who make that part of it, and other things that we have to do for this event, possible through their donations.”

The Eden Church Apple Butter Gospel Sing is Saturday, October 24, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at 3740 Switzerland Trail in Hot Springs. Come for the music, stay for the food, and don’t leave without a jar of apple butter while it lasts. Take it from somebody who’s been eating it for a long time.