by Jim Whitehouse
“We could use the Victorio Strainer machine,” I say to my beloved wife Marsha as we stand looking at a huge bag of apples.
I’m referring to an old-fashioned gizmo we’ve had for decades. You cut the apples into quarters, heat them up to soften them a bit. Then you dump them in the top of the machine, turn a crank, and apple sauce comes out into a bowl while the seeds and skins fall out the end.
It’s a miracle and came on the market in 1937 for making spaghetti sauce. As with apples, the tomato seeds, stems and skins are separated and pure, thick tomato juice comes out the end.
“Nope,” she says, as she says every year. “I like chunky apple sauce.”
“I like chunky apple sauce too, but I’m not crazy about peeling and coring 10,000 apples.”
“Hmmm,” she says sympathetically. Or, maybe she’s just humming “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.”
Thinking back to our early years of making apple sauce, when we peeled every apple by hand and cut out each core with a knife, I thank my lucky stars for my secret weapon.
It’s another old-fashioned gizmo. An apple peeler, corer and slicer.
You’ve seen them and have probably used one yourself. You stick a clean apple on some prongs, turn a crank, and the apple gets peeled, the core gets reamed out and you end up with nothing but a peeled apple with a hole in it, sliced to resemble a Slinky.
It is a marvelous tool and one that’s been around since 1864, invented by a clever guy named David Goodell from Antrim, New Hampshire. Even so, it’s a lot more work than using the strainer since it still requires trimming bits of peels from the ends of the Slinky and cutting out bits of un-centered cores.
“You know,” I say, “the apple peeler was invented a long time before the Victorio Strainer. We are living in the past. We should use the 1937 technology.”
“I like apple sauce that’s chunky, she says.
“You mentioned that,” I say. “100 times.”
Marsha would never say anything as rough as, “Tough luck, Big Shooter. Shut up and peel the apples.”
Nope. She’d never say that. But I can read her mind.
I stick the apple peeler to the countertop on its suction-cup base. I fill the sink with water and dump the first batch of apples in to clean them.
The first apple goes on the prongs and I begin to crank.
Darn it! I forgot to sharpen the blades. There are two of them. One peels the apple and the other cores it. When dull, the machine is hard to crank and the apples get mangled.
After removing and cleaning the blades, I take them down to my shop to sharpen them, walking through the storeroom to admire the Victorio Strainer which is gathering dust on a top shelf.
Sigh.
Chunky versus Smooth.
Chunky wins.
The newly sharpened blades do the job. Apple peels and cores fill a bowl while the sliced apples go one-by-one onto a cutting board where Marsha trims them and tosses them into a big kettle where they’ll simmer, along with a little sugar and cinnamon. The resulting wonderfulness, fully chunky, will get packed into properly labeled freezer containers.
Throughout the coming months, we’ll enjoy the fruits of the trees and of our labors.
The apple peeling, slicing and coring machine will keep its place on a high shelf in our kitchen while the poor Victorio Strainer will continue to gather dust in the basement storeroom. Too bad. It’s a wonderful machine, but it doesn’t do chunky.
Oh! Did I mention? Marsha likes chunky spaghetti sauce too.
