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 beverage, and it is written without a single measured temperature, time or vessel specification. The gap between what it describes and what a tested juice-preserving method requires is where the problems sit.
- No measured temperature or hold time"Heat to boiling point, but do not allow it to boil" is an eyeball instruction covering anything from a bare simmer to a scald. Pasteurizing juice depends on reaching a specific temperature and holding it for a specific time; without a thermometer and a stated hold, there is no way to know whether the yeast, mould and bacteria in raw pressed cider have actually been killed.
- Sealing hot is not processingPouring hot liquid into a bottle and capping it relies on the bottle and closure being sterile and on the contents being hot enough to sterilize the headspace. The recipe specifies neither sterilized containers nor any boiling-water processing afterwards, which is what current tested methods for bottled juice call for.
- The raisins undo the heatingThe raisins cut against the heating -- Two or three raisins dropped into each bottle go in cold and may carry wild yeast on their skins, along with more sugar. Depending on how hot the cider actually is when poured over them, that risks reintroducing live organisms into a container you have just sealed.
- Sealed fermentation means pressureThe recipe openly suggests letting the cider "just begin to ferment" for a tart flavour. Live yeast plus sugar in a sealed glass bottle or jug generates carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. Ordinary jars and jugs are not pressure-rated, and a bottle that lets go does so violently.
- Mould raises the pHCider's acidity is what normally keeps it out of the danger zone for the worst spoilage organisms. Surface mould growth in an under-processed sealed container consumes acid and can raise the pH of the contents, which removes exactly the protection people assume raw cider has.
- "Pumice"The word here means the pulp, skin and sediment floating up as the cider heats, not volcanic rock. Skimming it does improve clarity and keeps the finished cider from throwing a heavy lees, but it is primarily a clarity and flavour step rather than a preservation one, whatever the "great secret" language suggests.
- The health claimCider as "a great remedy for colds" is nineteenth-century household belief, not medicine. Treat it as period colour.
- If you want bottled ciderUse a current tested recipe for pasteurizing and canning apple juice, with a thermometer and stated processing times, or simply buy pasteurized cider and freeze what you cannot drink.
Sweet cider was the default farm drink of the American apple belt, and the annual problem was that it would not stay sweet: pressed in October, it began working within days, and by midwinter it was either hard cider or vinegar. Households that wanted the sweet version in February had to either keep it near freezing, bury it, or heat it, and heating is what this entry describes. The Dixie Cook-Book appeared in the 1880s, when Pasteur's work on heating wine and beer to kill spoilage organisms had filtered into domestic advice literature without any of the accompanying precision, so cookbooks of the period are full of confident bottling instructions that skip thermometers entirely. The raisins are the older, pre-scientific layer of the same tradition, added for reasons the recipe does not give, and they sit oddly alongside the heating step. The line about cider curing colds reflects a long-standing folk regard for the drink as a warming winter tonic rather than any documented effect.