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Cider (Should be made from ripe)
Cider should be made from ripe apples only, and for this reason, and to prevent fermentation, it is better to make it late in the Use only the best-flavored grafted fruit, rejecting all that are decayed or wormy. The best mills crush, not grind, the apples. The utmost neatness is necessary throughout the process. Press and strain juice as it comes from the press through a woollen cloth into a perfectly clean barrel; let stand two or three days if cool, if warm not more than a day; rack once a week for four weeks, put in bottles and cork tightly. This will make perfect unfermented cider. Do not put any thing in it to preserve it, as all so-called preservatives are humbugs. Lay the bottles away on their sides in sawdust.-C. T. Carson, Mt. Pleasant Farm.
This is a method for keeping raw apple juice sweet through the winter with nothing but cleanliness and repeated racking. It cannot be done safely, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Raw juice carries a documented pathogen riskUnpasteurized apple cider has been the source of confirmed outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Cryptosporidium. The organisms come in on fruit that has touched the ground or animal manure — which is most windfall fruit — and no amount of racking or straining through wool removes them.
- "Rejecting all that are decayed" is not enoughCarson's whole safety strategy is sound fruit and scrupulous cleanliness. That was reasonable advice for the period, but surface contamination is invisible, and a single dropped apple in a batch can seed the entire barrel. Modern commercial cider is either pasteurized or UV-treated for exactly this reason.
- Tightly corked bottles of unfermented juice build pressureWild yeast is present on apple skins and in any wooden barrel. Sweet cider sealed in glass will restart fermentation given warmth, and the carbon dioxide has nowhere to go. Bottles laid away corked tight in sawdust are a burst hazard.
- No heat step, no measured temperature, no acidity controlThe recipe specifies neither a processing temperature nor a holding time, and racking simply moves clear juice off the sediment. Nothing in the sequence is lethal to microorganisms. If you want shelf-stable sweet cider, use a current tested recipe with a stated pasteurization or canning process.
- What "racking" meansSiphoning the clear liquid off the lees into a fresh vessel, leaving the sediment behind. Weekly for four weeks was meant to strip out the yeast and solids that drive fermentation — it clarifies, but it does not sterilize.
- "Grafted fruit" and crushing versus grindingGrafted trees were named varieties with reliable flavor, as against seedling or "natural" fruit of unpredictable quality. The recipe's preference for mills that crush rather than grind reflects a common cider-maker's view that finer grinding brings more pulp and bitterness into the juice, though Carson gives no reason himself.
- "Cider" here means sweet, not hardNineteenth-century American usage applied "cider" to both the fresh juice and the fermented drink, with "sweet" and "hard" used to distinguish them. The entire object of this recipe is to prevent fermentation, not to encourage it.
Buckeye Cookery collected contributions from Ohio farm households, and this one comes signed from a named farm — the sort of practical authority the book traded on. Keeping cider sweet was a persistent problem on the pre-refrigeration American farm: apples were abundant, the press ran for a few weeks in autumn, and the juice began turning within days. Salicylic acid and sulphite "preservatives" were in commercial use in this period, were often useless or adulterated, and preservatives of this kind later became a target of food-purity campaigning, which may lie behind Carson's blunt line that all so-called preservatives are humbugs. His own approach — late-season pressing for cool weather, obsessive cleanliness, repeated racking to strip out yeast — was about the best that could be managed before heat treatment reached ordinary kitchens; commercial pasteurization of fruit juice did not become general practice in the United States until considerably later. Storing bottles on their sides in sawdust may have served double duty, insulating them and containing the glass if a bottle let go.