Apple Wine
INGREDIENTS.-10 lb. of sugar, 4 gallons of cider. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d. per gallon.
Put the cider and sugar into a cask that it does not fill within a gallon, and let it stand in a cool place, with the bung out for 2 days, then bung it, leaving a small vent, until the fermentation is over; then bung it securely, and the wine will be ready in a year. The cider used for this wine must be pure and made from ripe, sound fruit, or the wine will not be a success.
TIME.-12 months in cask.
SEASONABLE - make in January or February.
Apples à la Portugaise. - INGREDIENTS for 1 dish. -7 or 8 good boiling apples, 1/2 pint of water, 6 oz. of sugar, a little apple marmalade, preserved cherries.
AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Peel the apples, and, with a scoop, take out the cores; boil the fruit in the above proportion of sugar and water, without being too much done, and take care the apples do not break. Have ready some apple marmalade; cover the bottom of a glass dish with this, level it, and lay the apples in a sieve to drain; pile then neatly on the marmalade, raising them in the centre, and ornament with the preserved over makes a change in this dish.
SEASONABLE from August to March; but the apples become flavourless after February. | cherries. A plain boiled custard poured
This is a strong cider rather than a wine in the grape sense: sugar is added to already-fermented cider and the cask is left to work again for a year. The quantities are large by modern domestic standards and the method assumes cooperage most kitchens no longer have.
- The hinge: never bung tight too earlyFermentation produces carbon dioxide, and a sealed cask or carboy with no outlet can rupture. The instruction to leave the bung out, then leave a vent, then seal only when fermentation has finished, is the whole safety margin of the recipe. A fermentation lock does the same job with less guesswork.
- What "cider" means hereIn British usage of this period cider is the fermented alcoholic drink, not sweet pressed juice. Starting with 4 gallons of dry farmhouse cider and adding 10 lb of sugar produces a second fermentation and a considerably stronger, sweeter result, though the yeast will very likely stall before all that sugar is used and the finished strength is anyone's guess.
- Scaling downFour gallons is about 18 litres. For a one-gallon (4.5 litre) demijohn, use 2 1/2 lb of sugar to a gallon of cider and keep the same headspace principle: leave roughly a fifth of the vessel empty so the froth has somewhere to go.
- Headspace and ullage"A cask that it does not fill within a gallon" means deliberate air space during the active phase. Once fermentation stops, that air space becomes a liability, since oxygen browns and vinegars the wine. Rack into a smaller vessel filled to the neck for the long maturation.
- Sugar dissolves badly in cold ciderDumping dry sugar into a cool cask leaves a syrup layer at the bottom that ferments unevenly. Dissolve the sugar in a little warmed cider first and stir it through.
- "A cool place"Aim for 15-18C. Warmer gives a fast, coarse ferment with harsh aromas; much colder and the yeast in the cider will stall.
- SanitationThe recipe's insistence on pure cider from ripe, sound fruit is doing the work that sterilising solution does now. Any vessel, tap or siphon that touches the wine should be sanitised, or acetic bacteria will turn 4 gallons into cider vinegar over twelve months.
- Yield and timingRoughly 24 x 750 ml bottles from the full batch. The January or February start presumably suits cider from the autumn pressing that has finished its first fermentation, and gives a cool spring for the second, though the recipe says only when to make it, not why.
Apple wine of this kind is generally said to have belonged to farm and country-house cellars in cider-growing England, where casks of ordinary cider were plentiful and sugar, by the later nineteenth century, was cheap. Adding sugar to a finished cider raises the alcohol and produces something meant to keep and to be served like a wine rather than drunk young by the pint, and household manuals of the period file such recipes alongside gooseberry, elderberry and rhubarb wines as ways of turning a glut into something that sits in the cellar. The costing at 2s 6d per gallon is a reminder that Beeton's readership was expected to weigh homemade drink against the price of a bought bottle, and the twelve-month wait against the space a cask took up. The requirement that the cider be pure and made from ripe, sound fruit reflects a real hazard of the trade: much commercial cider was thin, watered or made from windfalls, and no amount of sugar would rescue it.