The Applesauce Gospel

Warm, spiced, comfortable.

The Applesauce Gospel

Warm, spiced, and just sweet enough.

We didn’t call it comfort food when I was growing up. We just called it applesauce.

But Mom’s applesauce was something different. It wasn’t pale and watery like the kind from a jar. It wasn’t something you scooped beside pork chops and ignored. Hers was deep, golden, and fragrant—spiced like apple pie and tasting like home.

She didn’t follow a recipe. She didn’t need one. She peeled and sliced the apples—always a mix, whatever was fresh or on sale—and cooked them down until they softened into themselves, bubbling gently on the stove. Then came the spices: cinnamon, allspice, clove, and nutmeg—never measured, just added until the flavor and aroma were perfect. The whole house would fill with their warmth, the air sweet and spiced and sacred.

Then she’d transfer them into her food mill—a deep cone-shaped colander that fit into a metal stand, with a kind of wooden dowel that looked like a chubby rolling pin.
The real magic was in the swirl. She’d load the mill, then swirl that wooden baton around and around, pressing the warm apples through the tiny holes into the bowl beneath. It was an all-day affair—quietly epic in the way only home cooking can be.

And if we were lucky, and she wasn’t too tired after her labors, we’d have pork chops for dinner—with a generous, warm slather of applesauce spooned on top.

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Byron and I both loved it.

Which says something, because Byron was a picky eater. He could go days on peanut butter alone—and often did. Wagon Wheel peanut butter came in thick plastic pails with a cowboy stamped on the side, and Byron treated those buckets like gold. He didn’t like fussy food, didn’t care for texture shifts or mystery ingredients. But he loved that applesauce.

So did I.

Mom would pack it into those empty peanut butter pails—rinsed and reused, lined up in the deep chest freezer in the garage. You’d reach down past the frozen casseroles and bags of ground beef, pull up a pail by the handle, and let it thaw on the counter.

One time, our back-door neighbor’s son had a birthday—and what he wanted, more than anything, was a pail of Mom’s applesauce.
So she gave him one.
A whole pail.

Best. Gift. Ever.

Because food is a gift.
Food is love.
Food is the Lord at work.

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I don’t make applesauce.
Too labor-intensive. Too sticky. Too much for a kitchen that’s often full of other to-dos.

But every once in a while, I’ll taste an apple pie that’s spiced just right—
not too sweet, still warm—
and there it is:
that same saucy warmth. That same quiet comfort. That same memory rising with the steam.

I still love peanut butter, by the way.
That’s something Byron and I share, even now.
Some days it’s what I reach for without thinking—on toast, on a spoon, right from the jar.
A small, salty reminder that love doesn’t vanish. It lingers. It nourishes. It waits in the pantry, right where you left it.

She wasn’t perfect. None of us are. But she made a damn good applesauce.

And that goodness lives on—in flavor, in feeling, in the sacred simplicity of being fed.

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Mom’s Applesauce (as best I remember it)

• A mix of apples (Fuji, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp—whatever’s fresh)

• A splash of water to start the cooking

• A squeeze of lemon

• Brown sugar, if the apples need it

• Cinnamon, allspice, clove, and nutmeg—never measured, just added until the flavor and aroma were perfect

• And time.

Instructions:
Cook the apples down until they collapse into themselves.
Run them through a food mill if you have one. (If not, mash with love.)
Serve warm or chilled. Best over pork chops—or straight from the spoon!