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Long before the days of • ' nutritional labeling, cholesterol 1 counting and low fat diets, that pale disk of pure butter sat on a > plate at the table, an essential part of every meal.
So was the apple butter they ‘ simmered in massive kettles and stirred for hours. In an oral . history that Miss Nellie and Miss Ethel recorded in 1995, they reminisced that as children in what was then considered part of Appalachia, they learned to turn even hot, tedious jobs like stirring the apple butter, into a game. They’d sing a jingle as they stirred, trying to avoid tapping the edge of the dasher against the kettle. Whoever slipped and tapped the kettle had to reveal a secret.
Miss Ethel, Nellie and their brother Charlie, who died in ! 1975, spent their entire lives engaged in hard, physical labor. Long into their 60’s, when most other people are retiring or at least slowing down, they milked cows, carried water from the spring, turned over and planted the garden by hand, butchered pigs, canned vegetables, sausage and jam, dried apples and picked mushrooms.
Mr. Charlie worked wood using handmade materials and techniques so old-fashioned that when he died the Smithsonian bought most of the tools in his cooper shop. Miss Ethel and Miss Nellie baked bread daily in a roaring kitchen wood stove, even on summer days when the temperature approached 100. They made sunbonnets with calico remnants and cardboard slats cut from cereal boxes. And they wore dresses, straight, calflength shifts that they stitched together on a treadle sewing machine.
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