The eighth annual Halfmoon Bay Apple Festival in Coopers Green on Oct. 23 featured pony rides, music, apple butter, caramel apples, jams, a soup contest, vintage apples, pies, crafts, and a lot more.
This year about $1,300 was raised, which will go towards a new community hall in Coopers Green through the Halfmoon Bay Community Association. Additional funds were also raised by the Halfmoon Bay Elementary PAC.
About 180 jars of apple butter were canned from at least 1,200 apples donated from local orchards and private homes, according to organizer Katie Angermeyer.
Angermeyer came up with the idea to start the festival in 2009.
“I live on Redrooffs and I realized that I didn’t know my neighbours even though I’d been there for awhile,” Angermeyer said. “So I decided that I needed something to give to my community and maybe be able to meet people at the same time.”
Angermeyer came up with the idea of making apple butter, which she said was a fun thing to do when she lived in Kentucky. Apple butter is concentrated applesauce with sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and clove.
In their first year Angermeyer discovered that making the apple butter took a lot longer than expected. After getting the fire lit at around 3 p.m., she and the other volunteers stayed up all night stirring it.
“The all-night thing was actually part of the old tradition,” Angermeyer said. “It was the men who would do that. The women would cut up all the apples and then the men would stir them all night and then the women would can it in the morning – well, ours wasn’t ready in the morning.
“We keep improving our process – we make the applesauce in advance now,” she said. “We actually have three work parties to make enough. It is a lot of work.”
High school students from Chatelech Secondary made some in their cooking class. Another batch was made at Oktoberfest in downtown Sechelt last month.
“Then we had one more work party to get enough for a good batch,” Angermeyer said. “It’s a European tradition to have a community pot. Everybody’s apples get ripe at the same time, you save the ones that will keep over the winter but the ones that are going to go bad – you don’t want to waste anything – so they would make something like apple butter or cider – something that they could use the apples for. Apple butter probably comes from Germany.
“It’s a dying art, though, Angermeyer added. “I think maybe Mennonites might still do it. It’s fun if you have enough workers. People don’t know how to work that way anymore, though. You don’t finish the job until it’s done and it might take you all weekend. You’ve got to get the apples done. It was survival in those days – now you can just go to the store.”
Apple butter is still for sale for $10 per jar at Dolphin Physio and Fitness, #102 - 5711 Mermaid St. in Sechelt. See more – including a recipe for apple butter custard pie – at www.halfmoonbayapplefestival.com
