'Perfect every time': Waycaster has made apple butter over 75 years

Virginia Waycaster prefers her homemade apple butter on a hot buttered biscuit.

She made her first batch of apple butter at age 14, alongside her exacting mother, Samantha Riddle, on the family’s wood-burning stove at their home in Burnsville.

Waycaster, 91, moved from Burnsville to Mills River in 1955 with her husband, Roy Waycaster, who passed away in 2002. The pair met on Feb. 14, 1946, and were married June 14 that same year, the start of a "very good marriage."

Family comes up often as she talks about the apple butter she’s made for more than 75 years, including her eldest son, Richard, who died in Vietnam in 1969 just 60 days from making it home. Her family counts on it, even her two great grandchildren and her two great-great grandchildren.

Each year, as the holidays near, she makes apple butter the old way, by hand.

The jars, which she says usually make it back to her, travel beyond the family, too, making the rounds of Henderson County.

They go out, always free, to the restaurant on the corner or to the local Ingle’s manager, who took a jar this year and tapped her on the shoulder two or three days later to tell her he hadn’t had anything like it in years – that he could put a spoonful of it in his coffee.

It’s a neighbor, Linda Erwin, who pushed her to reach out to the press about it.

She’s made the apple butter the same way ever since that first time with her mother, who was “very particular,” Waycaster said. “She was very careful.”

Unlike Waycaster, her mother didn’t give it out around town - she just made it for the family - but Waycaster said just about every family in Burnsville at the time was making it, too.

But these days, she doesn’t know of anyone that still makes it the way she does.

“People just won’t do it,” Waycaster said from her home in Mills River, five dozen jars still standing on either side of her electric stove, next to decades-old cookware she still uses.

"If I don't get tired, surely these young people could do it," she added, but she doesn't knock anyone who may use the Crock-Pot method or make it other ways.

She’s got a cone sieve with pestle she still uses, pushing the boiled apples through the tiny holes by hand. She's had the sieve since about 1950, though it’s likely older than that, and she says it's still “just like it was the day I got it.”

A couple of large dishpans are just as old, if not older, and also look like they’ve weathered little over the past 70 or so years.

Waycaster hasn’t slowed down much either, noting that she’s only on one small blood pressure pill, and how her doctor "just thinks that's great."

“I, for one thing, I enjoy making it,” she said, asked why she keeps it up. “And then after I get it made, I think it’s pretty. And then, too, I’m a person who loves to share.”

This year, thanks to a stroke of luck at a church sale, she made more than usual, a total of 101 jars.

One man selling apples at the church sale had three bushels left over and didn’t know what to do with them. Waycaster said she’d take them if they loaded them in her van, so they did.

“I said fill my van, and he put every one of them in there,” she says with a laugh.

She never misses a year making the apple butter but never makes this much, not at $25 a bushel, she said.

She doesn’t have the recipe written down anywhere, but could write it down word for word if someone wanted it, she said. She’d just have to take her time and make it sure it was written clearly and succinctly.

“It’s a long process, but I enjoy it,” Waycaster said. “People think it’s strange me being 91, but I enjoy doing it.”

Red Rome Beauties are the only apple to use, she says, not sweet but not sour: just right for apple butter.

The apples are cut up into chunks with the peel still on, and boiled.

“Just a pinch or two of cinnamon,” Waycaster says.

Then it’s about one box of Sure Jell, stir well and let that get boiling, for one minute. Then add sugar, let that boil exactly one minute. The jars should be ready, in boiling water.

“You have to have everything right ready, you’re just in a twirl,” she said. “Then you seal your jars.”

She sets a towel over the jars and several hours later, or through the night, she’ll hear them all seal.

That’s a point she reiterates - to have all the utensils, dishes and tools out and ready to go.

“You don’t have time to hunt all these utensils. You’ve got to have everything at your fingertips, even right down to the little cinnamon,” she said. “Get everything right ready, then start making it.”

When it’s finished, it slices out but it’s soft, Waycaster said. It doesn’t run, different from what most people think when they picture apple butter.

“It comes out perfect every time,” Waycaster said. “That’s what I’m proud of. I never lose a jar.”