If all goes well today, we propose to go the Snitz Fest at the Hans Herr House. The day will center on the apple, a very important fruit in colonial life. The Germans were not the only ones to appreciate the apple; its use and value were recognized widely. Leases of land often required the lessee to plant one hundred, or two hundred apple trees.
At the Herr House demonstrators will be making apple butter. In Germany, the ancestor of apple butter was made with damsel plums. In America, the plum was not available or did not yield results which were considered good. So, the apple was used in its place. It is an outdoor activity, with an open fire under a large iron kettle (probably used at other times for laundry, making soap, rendering fat, etc.). Cut up apples are cooked and stirred and stirred and stirred. A very long handled implement is used for the stirring so that the stirrer does not roast himself on the fire. Spices are added for flavoring.
The word " snitz " itself means " cut ." Except for eating one directly, almost all of the uses of the apple required it to be cut into pieces first. A lot of apples were dried as a preservative means. The cut pieces were spread in the sun. Children were assigned the task of chasing away the animals. Little could be done about the bees and wasps. The dried fruit would last much longer than the fresh fruit.
Apples were cut up as the first step in making cider. The cut pieces, which did not need to be cleaned of the seeds and skin, were put into a press and squeezed to force the juice out. (Some presses were hand powered while others used horse power to grind and to press.) This juice was the cider. Cider does not keep a long period of time as soft cider. After a bit it begins to get a bit of bite. With a sufficient conversion of the sugars into alcohols, the beverage will keep.
With still more effort and equipment, the cider is distilled (separated) into a beverage of even higher alcoholic content. Though Christian Herr, when he died in 1750, had two stills in his estate inventory, this facet of activity will probably not be demonstrated. Though the eighteenth century, denizens, of all nationalities and faiths consumed alcoholic beverages, the practice is not approved by many today.
(Christian Herr, the son of Hans Herr, was the owner and builder of what is known as the Hans Herr House today. Like his father, Christian was a farmer, orchardist, distiller, and Anabaptist minister.)
Some other eighteenth century activities to be demonstrated are the bake oven, blacksmithing, wool spinning, fabric dyeing, and sausage smoking.
If you are in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, come to the Hans Herr House today from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
(I just have to interject a note here about John's descriptions of making apple butter, dried apples, and apple cider. This is not the 1700's and I certainly didn't grow up during those years; but, I can remember my mother and grandmother making apple butter, dried apples, and apple cider. My ancestors on my Mother's side of the family came, for the most part, from VA and the Germanna immigrants. These immigrants were the families of BROYLES and WILHITE/WILHOIT, whose descendants migrated to what is now East Tennessee (at the time it was Western North Carolina). Anyway, when growing up, we children were always "elected" to help out when it came time for making apple butter. It was much the same as John describes, except making apple butter ALWAYS entailed a copper kettle, not an iron one. An iron kettle was OK for making lard, washing clothing, etc., but no self-respecting farmer EVER made apple butter in one! The reason for this was that once the apples have cooked down and start looking like apple butter, the mix becomes extremely vulnerable to over cooking and sticking to the sides of the kettle. That was the reason for John's "stirring, stirring, and stirring". Making apple butter in iron kettles was almost impossible since it almost always stuck to the sides of the kettle. For some reason, apple butter made in a copper kettle almost never stuck to the sides. We, too, used spices for the apple butter. I can't remember anything being used other than Cinnamon, but there could have been other spices. By the way, I believe that my brother still has the original copper kettle used in our family for near a hundred years. The wooden paddle used to stir the apple butter HAD to be made of Sassafras wood. I don't know why, but it has been that way for a couple hundred years. (My brother may have the copper kettle, but I have the Sassafras paddle, which is older than I am!)
As to dried apples, I still do this every year, just to have a winter's supply of apples from which to make "fried apple pies". We use the same techniques that our ancestors used, except that once the apples are dried, we sprinkle the pieces with a very small amount of sulphur before placing them in hand-sewn cloth bags to hang up in a dry place for winter use.
We had a fair sized apple orchard on the farm when I was growing up and had lots of apples from which to make all these things. We didn't have a cider press, but my mother somehow managed to get the juice from the apples and put it into large jars for later consumption during the winter. John is correct in that it doesn't keep long, having a tendency to turn first to "hard" cider, and, if kept long enough, to turn into apple vinegar. One doesn't need to distill the "hard" cider in order to produce an alcoholic beverage. If consumed before it turns into vinegar, the cider is a respectable alcoholic drink. (GRIN)
I guess my point is that there are still many of us Germanna descendants around who not only remember how to do these "old" things, but still practice them. John hasn't touched on other practices from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as making lard, curing meat, storing root vegetables in earthen underground storage, etc., but there are still a bunch of us here in East Tennessee, at least, who keep the old practices alive. I'm not all that old either, will be 60 on October 11. My siblings and I grew up on a farm and, after my having spent 22 years in the USAF and returning to Tennessee, the most enjoyable part about the homecoming was that I could once again join in these nostalgic enterprises. There is ABSOLUTELY nothing like home-made apple butter, home-cured hams, fried apple pies, and "souse meat".)
(The above "add-on" to John's Notes is courtesy of George W. Durman, the curator of these BROYLES Family History web pages.)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.