Bottled Cider
Take good sweet cider (if a tart flavor is wished, iet it just begin to ferment), put on stove, skim thoroughly (as the great secret is to remove all pumice from the cider), heat to boiling point, but do not allow it to boil, and then pour in bottles or jugs and seal while hot. Some put two or three raisins in each bottle or jug. This keeps all winter. It certainly makes a richer drink than when fresh, and as cider is pronounced a great remedy for colds, all should know this simple way of keeping it.
This is a home-canning procedure for a fermentable liquid, and it fails on two counts: the pressure it can build inside sealed glass, and the absence of any measured temperature or hold time. Read it as a document rather than a set of instructions.
- The fermentation instruction is the fatal one"Let it just begin to ferment" means active yeast is present. Heating short of boiling, with no held temperature and no timing, does not reliably kill it, and a sealed bottle of refermenting cider becomes a pressure vessel that can burst.
- The raisins make it worseThe raisins add sugar to a sealed container -- Dried fruit may carry wild yeast on its skin and does add a little sugar, though cider poured in near boiling would kill much of what is on the surface. Either way, fermentable material sealed into a jug of sweet cider tends toward a secondary fermentation in a closed container.
- No temperature, no hold"Heat to boiling point, but do not allow it to boil" gives no number and no duration. Pasteurization is a temperature held for a time, not a moment at which a pot is pulled off the stove; without both figures the step cannot be evaluated or repeated.
- Hot-fill sealing is not a substitute for processingPouring hot liquid into bottles or jugs and capping them relies on the cooling contents to pull a seal. The recipe says nothing about sterilising the vessels or about what closure to use, and any seal that fails admits spoilage organisms into a sugary liquid held at room temperature for a whole winter.
- "Pumice" means the scum, not the pomace"Pumice" here is the material skimmed off -- The word is generally taken as a variant spelling of "pomace," the apple pulp and lees suspended in the cider, which rises as froth on heating. Skimming it off improves clarity and keeps the cider from tasting muddy, but it removes nothing that affects safety.
- "Keeps all winter" assumed a cold cellar"Keeps all winter" assumed cold storage -- The claim presumes an unheated cellar or buttery over a northern winter, not a modern heated pantry, and should be read against those conditions.
- The medical claimCider is not a remedy for colds. Treat the last sentence as period advertising for a household staple, not advice.
- If you want bottled ciderUse a current, tested recipe for pasteurizing and processing fruit juice, which will specify a temperature, a hold time and a water-bath process for the jar size.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, compiled from contributions by farm and small-town housewives, and cider is exactly the sort of thing such a book takes for granted. Apples were pressed by the barrel every autumn across the Ohio Valley, and the problem was never getting cider but keeping it sweet: left alone it turns hard within weeks, then to vinegar. Households met this in several ways at once, boiling it down to syrup, freezing off the water, letting it go to vinegar deliberately, or, as here, heating and sealing it. The instruction to let it "just begin to ferment" for a tart flavor shows how fluid the line between sweet and hard cider was in practice, at a period when temperance sentiment was making that line socially significant. The closing remark about colds reflects a widespread nineteenth-century habit of assigning a medicinal function to ordinary household drinks; it should be read as custom rather than as any documented use.