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Crab-Apple Champagne
Crush fruit as for apple cider and proceed as for cider making, but let the verjuice (or crab-apple juice) stand without the mustard seed or other means for keeping it from getting "hard." At the end of two or three years the verjuice has become very similar to champagne.
This is less a recipe than a note on what happens if you leave crab-apple cider alone for a very long time. The original assumes you already know how to press and ferment cider, so nearly everything that matters is unstated.
- Verjuice here means crab-apple juiceVerjuice here probably means crab-apple juice -- the original pairs the two in a parenthesis, though it may be offering an alternative rather than a definition. Elsewhere in older cookery verjuice can mean the juice of unripe grapes used as an acid seasoning, which is not what is meant here.
- What the mustard seed was forEarlier cider entries in books of this period call for hanging a bag of white mustard seed in the barrel to keep the cider sweet, that is, to slow fermentation so it does not go "hard" or alcoholic. Omitting it, as instructed, is the whole point: this drink is meant to ferment out completely.
- Crab apples are not a garnish fruit hereYou need real quantity, on the order of 15 lb or more of fruit per gallon of juice, and expect a very high-acid, high-tannin must, so the finished drink will be tart and sharp rather than sweet.
- Sanitation is the hingeWith no preservative and a two- or three-year rest, the only thing standing between you and vinegar is keeping air off the juice. Ferment under an airlock, keep the vessel topped up, and rack off the lees; acetobacter turns exposed cider to vinegar within weeks.
- The sparkle, and the danger of chasing itThe champagne resemblance comes from a slow secondary fermentation in a sealed vessel. Do not bottle cider that is still fermenting in ordinary glass. Use proper pressure-rated bottles and let the primary fermentation finish first; period accounts of "cider champagne" are studded with burst bottles.
- Two or three years is a maximum, not a requirementTwo or three years may be longer than strictly necessary -- in a cool cellar the drink is likely to be clear and drinkable well before that, though the recipe credits the long rest with the champagne character. Taste as you go; past a certain point you get thin, oxidised cider rather than anything like wine.
- It is an alcoholic drinkFully fermented crab-apple cider will land somewhere around 4 to 7 percent alcohol. Home fermentation for personal use is legal in most places but subject to volume limits; selling it is a different matter entirely.
Crab apples were a hedgerow and dooryard crop rather than a market one, too sour and too small to eat out of hand but full of the acid and tannin that make cider keep and taste of something. Farm households pressed whatever apples they had, and the difference between sweet cider, hard cider and vinegar was mostly a matter of how long you let the barrel sit and whether you tried to stop it. The mustard seed the author tells you to leave out was one of the standard folk brakes on fermentation, along with sulphur matches and repeated racking. Calling the result champagne is a piece of optimism of a familiar kind, from a habit by which almost any clear, sharp, sparkling homemade drink got the name; sparkling apple wines were being made in earnest in Normandy and in parts of England, but a farmhouse barrel left alone for three years is a cousin at best.