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Each year in September, the “Latwerch Fest,” or plum butter fest, takes place in Morbach, a part of Niederkirchen. Organizer and local Hella Ullinger will open up her property from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday to invite interested guests to the traditional event.
Visitors can taste and purchase different types of fruit butter: plum butter, diet butter, and apple and mirabelle butter. Ullinger and many other Morbach residents, females and males, old and young citizens, help prepare the fruit butter based on an original grandmother’s recipe.
Hella Ullinger (third from left) and Morbach residents come together and prepare fruit for plum butter to be offered during the annual Latwerch Fest Sunday.
“We usually come together weeks before the fest to do preparations for the different jellies,” Ullinger said. “Especially our senior citizens enjoy working together, sharing old stories and getting a homemade lunch. They don’t mind dedicating a lot of hours.”
New products this year will be a marmalade made of red, black and white currants, a combination of pineapple, coconut and zucchini, and a jelly made of pumpkin, ginger and orange. Other specialties will be blackberry, elderberry and gooseberry marmalade. Pear butter might also be included if the fruit are ripe enough. If not, interested visitors will be able to taste pear butter during the farmers market Sept. 29 in Schneckenhausen. Also available will be Latwerch cookies based on Ullinger’s great grandmother’s recipe.
“During the Latchwerch Fest, we serve a traditional Palatinate lunch for this time of the year: homemade potato soup with plum cake,” Ullinger said. “My helpers and I usually get up at 2 a.m. and bake about 50 plum cakes.”
The women of Morbach will bake various other cakes to be served with coffee all daylong. Proceeds from the cakes will be given through the Friends of Morbach to the Morbach youth.
The organizer’s grandchildren, Emily, 9, and Kyana, 6, and their friend Tim, 8, will hold a flea market and donate all proceeds to a girl in Uganda. Ullinger and the Morbach community are sponsoring the event.
The Latwerch Fest will take place on Hochstrasse 18 in Morbach, which is a part of Niederkirchen, located north of Otterberg.
