Apple butter (Dutch: appelstroop) is a highly concentrated form of apple sauce produced by long, slow cooking of apples with apple juice or water to a point where the sugar in the apples caramelizes, turning the apple butter a deep brown. The concentration of sugar gives apple butter a much longer shelf life as a preserve than apple sauce.
The J.M. Smucker Company, also known as Smucker's, is an American manufacturer of food and beverage products. Headquartered in Orrville, Ohio, the company was founded in 1897 as a maker of apple butter. J.M. Smucker currently has three major business units: consumer foods, pet foods, and coffee. Its flagship brand, Smucker's, produces fruit preserves, peanut butter, syrups, frozen crustless sandwiches, and ice cream toppings.
Among J.M. Smucker's other food and coffee brands are Bick's Pickle, Café Bustelo, Carnation Milk (Canada), Crosse & Blackwell, Dunkin', Five Roses (Canada), Folgers, Golden Temple (Canada), Jif, Knott's Berry Farm, Laura Scudder's, Robin Hood (Canada), Santa Cruz Organic, and Smucker's Uncrustables. Pet food brands include Meow Mix and Milk-Bone, among others. In 2023, Smuckers acquired Hostess Brands, the makers of Twinkies, in a $5.6 billion cash and stock deal. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: SJM), J.M. Smucker ranks 426th on the Fortune 500, with an estimated 2022 market value of $14.6 billion.
Dutch cuisine is formed from the cooking traditions and practices of the Netherlands. The country's cuisine is shaped by its location on the fertile Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta at the North Sea, giving rise to fishing, farming, and overseas trade. Due to the availability of water and flat grassland, the Dutch diet contains many dairy products such as butter and cheese. The court of the Burgundian Netherlands enriched the cuisine of the elite in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century, a process continued in the 17th and 18th centuries thanks to colonial trade. At this time, the Dutch ruled the spice trade, played a pivotal role in the global spread of coffee, and started the modern era of chocolate by developing the Dutch process of first removing fat from cocoa beans using a hydraulic press, creating cocoa powder, and then alkalizing it to make it less acidic and more palatable.
Dutch cuisine can traditionally be divided in three regions. The northeast of the country is known for its meats and sausages (rookworst, metworst) and heavy rye bread, the west for fish (smoked eel, soused herring, kibbeling, mussels), spirits (jenever) and dairy based products (stroopwafel, boerenkaas), and the south for stews (hachee), fruit products and pastry (Limburgse vlaai, apple butter, bossche bol). A peculiar characteristic for Dutch breakfast and lunch is the sweet bread toppings such as hagelslag, vlokken, and muisjes, and the Dutch are the highest consumers of liquorice in the world.
Berkeley Springs, formally named Bath, is a town in Morgan County, West Virginia, United States, and its county seat. The population was 758 at the 2020 census. In 1776, the Virginia Legislature incorporated a town around the springs and named it Bath. Since 1802, it has been referred to by the name of its original post office, Berkeley Springs. It is located in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and is part of the Hagerstown–Martinsburg metropolitan area.
The area contains mineral water springs frequented by Native Americans indigenous to the area, possibly for thousands of years. After settlement by Europeans, the mineral springs drew many visitors from urban areas. Notable colonial visitors to the area included George Washington and James Rumsey. Berkeley Springs remained a popular resort area during the United States' early years. It is the home of the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, the longest-running and largest such event in the world. Another local tradition is the Apple Butter Festival, started by a group of local business owners and led by then Mayor Frank Heiner, in 1974. It continues to be a popular resort area, with tourism the primary industry in the county and there being six full-service spas using mineral water.