In West Virginia, autumn means apple butter. Meet a family helping to keep the tradition alive.
Kathy Legg grew up in the hills of Clay County—in Fola, West Virginia, to be exact—just down the road from her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother’s house was always full of family and food. Actually, “full” may be an understatement.
“My grandmother and my aunts used to cook fresh bread for every meal. Three times a day,” Kathy says. It’s a tradition she has carried on, to a degree, in her more than two decades as a cook at Clay County High School.
Aside from breadmaking, Kathy remembers spending fall days around a large cookpot over a wood fire in her grandmother’s yard. She and her cousins would spend days gathering Golden Delicious apples from the orchard and watching as the women of the family peeled, cored, and sliced the apples before dumping them into the copper pot. Then they would spend the rest of the day stirring, turning the fruit into rich, red apple butter.
When Kathy’s grandmother passed away, her mother took up the tradition, then Kathy after her. The recipe now lives into the fourth generation of the family with Duane, Kathy’s oldest son, taking the lead. It was largely Duane who was inspired to turn it from a family tradition into a family business. Old Fashioned Copper Kettle Apple Butter—about as straightforward a name as you can get—started in 1994 as an expansion of their hobby, and it’s pretty much stayed that way.
“Even when we’re making it people will just stop by. They may not stay all day, but they’ll stop by to chit chat or help stir or whatever,” Duane says. “It’s really just something we’ve always enjoyed doing.”
Business as Usual
Very little has changed since the days of cooking apple butter over a fire outside Kathy’s grandmother’s house in the early 1960s. They had to buy a new copper kettle when the original one wore out. Legg’s grandmother’s wooden stirring paddle broke after decades of use, so a woodworker in Clay County fashioned a new one identical to the original.
Turns out, it ruins the end product if you cook apple butter any other way than in a 30-gallon copper kettle over an open flame. It turns into baby food, Duane says. “It gets real pasty looking when it’s been processed by machinery and cooked in a commercial kitchen,” he says. It’s not something he’d ever want to eat, let alone put his family name on.
The Leggs’ recipe has faced only slight modifications for contemporary clientele. “We’ve made two changes to the recipe,” Duane says. “My grandmother and great-grandmother used to put silver dollars in the bottom of the kettle to supposedly keep it from burning. We stopped doing that, and then we removed the cinnamon candy out of it because of the red dye.” The dye helped give the apple butter a richer color, Duane explains, but he’s a manufacturer now and has to be careful about food allergies.
West Virginia’s apple butter industry remains so small that the state Department of Agriculture doesn’t keep sales statistics on the product. The agency does track the larger apple industry, though. Sales topped $4.8 million in 2012, ranking the state 11th in the nation.
Part of those sales, even if just a small part, was thanks to the Leggs. They use West Virginia apples—and especially West Virginia-grown Golden Delicious apples—as often as possible. Part of it is tradition. Kathy grew up just six miles from Porter’s Creek in Clay County, where the varietal was discovered. But part of it is quality. “We’ve made it with other apples, like a blend of winesaps and Rome apples, but it just doesn’t taste the same,” Duane says.
Staying Small, on Purpose
The Leggs have had conversations with national grocers about stocking the West Virginia-made product on shelves across the country, but profit margins would be low—unless they sacrificed their cooking method and, with it, the quality of their apple butter. And that’s obviously not going to happen.
So they continue to sell their apple butter at local retailers across the state, like Tamarack in Beckley and Heritage Station in Huntington. They also take their cooking act on the road to the state’s fairs and festivals. They’ll set up their kettle, get a batch started, and spend the day listening to fellow West Virginians share their own memories of traditional food. And they often get to help non-natives make new memories with apple butter, handing them hunks of bread and inviting them to sop up what’s left on the kettle walls after the latest batch has been jarred.
For the Leggs, the family business is likely to stay small. They’ve experimented with new flavors, including ginger, clove, and sugar free as well as a salted caramel flavor. But Duane doesn’t foresee a future outside of their singular product. Duane and Kathy say they’re satisfied with the
business they’ve grown—cooking and selling a product with a deep meaning, both for them and other West Virginians.
“I guess you can’t say it’s as American as baseball and apple pie, but if you’re from West Virginia, chances are you’ve had apple butter,” Duane says. “Apple butter is West Virginia’s version of the American apple pie.”
This story was originally published in the October 2018 issue of Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.
written by Ashton Marra
photographs courtesy of Duane Legg