Cider
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 farm procedure for making and keeping sweet cider without heat, chemicals or refrigeration, and it is the keeping that fails. The reasons are worth understanding even though the method should not be followed.
- Raw juice, no kill stepNothing in this process heats the juice or otherwise destroys pathogens. Apples gathered from the ground carry E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium; both have caused documented outbreaks traced to untreated cider, and the illness falls hardest on children and the elderly. Commercial cider is now pasteurized or UV-treated for exactly this reason.
- "Perfect unfermented cider" is not unfermentedApple skins carry wild yeast, and the recipe's own opening concern with preventing fermentation, together with the sediment that four weekly rackings presupposes, indicates fermentation had begun. What goes into the bottle is juice with live yeast and residual sugar in it.
- Corked tight and laid on its sideSealing a fermenting liquid in glass builds carbon dioxide pressure with nothing to vent it. Plain bottles are not built for it and can burst; bursting bottles are a recognised hazard of home bottling, and modern instructions specify pressure-rated bottles, measured priming sugar and a known point of fermentation.
- "All so-called preservatives are humbugs"Preservatives used for cider in this period included sulphur burned in the barrel or added as sulphite, as well as salicylic acid and benzoates. Sulphite is in fact what allowed cider to be kept clean and is still used in winemaking in measured doses.
- RackingDrawing the clear liquid off the sediment into a fresh vessel, leaving the lees behind. Repeated rackings remove much of the yeast with the lees, which is how the maker hoped to slow fermentation without resorting to heat.
- A gap in the text"Better to make it late in the" is broken in the original printing; the word is almost certainly season or fall. Cold weather slows fermentation, which is the whole basis of the method.
- Sawdust storageA cellar practice: sawdust insulates, keeps bottles from clinking, and helps hold an even temperature. It assumes an unheated cellar staying cool through the winter, a condition most houses no longer have.
- If you want ciderBuy pasteurized juice, or follow a current recipe from a source that specifies temperatures, sanitation and pressure-rated bottles.
Cider was the ordinary table drink of American farms well into the nineteenth century, made from apples that had no other market. The Dixie Cook-Book gathers contributions from named households, and this one carries a farm name rather than a town alone; the insistence on grafted fruit rather than seedling apples, and on mills that crush rather than grind, is trade knowledge, not kitchen advice. The phrase "unfermented cider" belongs to the temperance decades, when sweet cider was defended as the innocent drink and hard cider the ruinous one, and a good deal of ingenuity went into keeping barrels sweet through the winter. That effort largely ended with commercial pasteurization, which in time made a stable sweet cider something to buy rather than to coax out of a cellar.