Feature article
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Seniors revive heirloom apple relish recipe
By Fred Sauceman
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The Clinchfield Senior Adult Center gets a little money from the town of Erwin and the county of Unicoi, but not enough to keep the doors open and the exercise equipment tuned up, especially since members are charged only $15 a year to belong.
For fund-raising raffles, donated homemade quilts were becoming harder to come by five years ago, so executive director Charlene O’Dell had to devise another way to meet the budget. Looking for a tie-in to the annual Apple Festival, which takes place the first full weekend in October, Charlene remembered her grandmother’s table and a dish she’d never seen anywhere outside Cocke County, Tennessee. Leona Ford called it apple relish. From the mountains of Grassy Fork, near the North Carolina line, she passed the recipe down to her daughter, Mary Clark, and she, in turn, to Charlene.
Apple relish bears a kinship to chow-chow, but Charlene says she had never heard of chow-chow growing up in Cocke County. On top of their soup beans, the Ford family spooned apple relish, vinegar sour and hot pepper pungent.
Charlene likens it to a salsa. And it may fall somewhere in the chutney family lineage, too. Where it originally came from, Charlene isn’t sure, but she has revived the recipe, and it has changed cooking habits in many Unicoi County kitchens.
Members of the Senior Adult Center work from July through September making apple relish, in the building’s well-appointed, restaurant-quality kitchen. Charlene is a quiet, soft-spoken supervisor, but she’s a stickler for consistency and food safety. As a young girl in Newport, she and a friend worked the green bean line at the Stokely-Van Camp cannery.
“Anything that got by us got in the can,” she laughs.
Charlene insists that the cubes of Granny Smith apples that go into the relish measure half an inch and that all the pepper pieces be the same size.
“Making apple relish is labor-intensive,” says Charlene. “Two years ago we found a commercial chopper, and that’s made a huge difference. Then last year we discovered a fairly inexpensive little chopper with two stainless steel grids perfect for hot pepper.”
The seniors make two versions of relish. Each contains red and green bell peppers and jalapeńos. The “hot” has all three plus serrano peppers.
When news of contaminated hot peppers in Mexico began circulating in the summer of 2008, Charlene turned to Terry Williams, a retired engineer who lives at the head of Devils Fork Gap, along the North Carolina line, property well-suited for growing serranos.
“This year we did not use any jalapeńos or serranos that were not locally grown,” Charlene tells me.
Demand for apple relish has grown to the point where the volunteers make around 760 pints a year. Each person has a special role in this division of labor, and despite all the chopping required, the many hands make quick work of vegetable preparation, and a batch is ready to cook after about 15 minutes. In addition to apples and peppers, the simple, clear-cut recipe calls for onions, vinegar and sugar.
The relish is sold at the center year-round and during the festival on the corner of Main and Union in Erwin. Charlene says many people buy it in cases of 12 for use as Christmas gifts.
Unicoi County cooks have devised countless ways to use their newly adopted product. Betty Peterson, the senior center’s apple peeler, chops the relish a little finer and adds it to her potato salad. Linda Tolley drains the relish, rubs pork roasts with it, and cooks the meat in the oven at 350 degrees for about three hours. She also dresses hot dogs with apple relish and stirs it into rice. Her husband mixes it into his green beans.
One of the most popular uses is to pour the drained relish over a block of cream cheese for an appetizer. Apple relish finds its way into deviled eggs, chicken salad and tuna salad. But for Charlene, “Soup beans are not complete without apple relish.”
Thousands of people come by the senior center booth during the Apple Festival each October, resulting in many conversations and questions about apple relish. Charlene says few people outside Unicoi County know about it.
“One lady who came to the festival a few years ago had heard of it when she was growing up in Arkansas. Another lady from Maryville told me her mother made pear relish, and the rest of the ingredients were identical. This past spring, during the Strawberry Festival in Unicoi, a gentleman and his wife came by our table. He said he hadn’t seen apple relish since his grandmother made it, and he, too, grew up in Cocke County.”
I ask Charlene what her grandmother, Leona Ford, would think about the fate of her once obscure recipe.
“I’m sure she would be very happy but surprised at the mass production, although she worked at Stokely-Van Camp when she was first married. So she was familiar with an assembly line.”
And, I’m sure the frugal farm girl would have appreciated the fact that not even the apple peelings are wasted. After the cooking’s done, Betty Peterson feeds them to five deer who await the fruity treat on her property.
Adds Lucinda Britton, “Me and Betty fight over the peelings because I have a six-point at my house, and some turkeys.”
Note: The Unicoi County Apple Festival takes place this year on Oct. 3 and 4 in downtown Erwin.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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