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To Preserve Cider Sweet
. - When fermentation begins draw cider off, rinse barrel, strain through flannel and pour back, take one pint , rinse barrel, strain through flannel and pour back, take one pint alcohol, one-quarter ounce, each, oil of sassafras and winter green, shake well and add to cider. Some use this when cider is new and find it works perfectly TOMATO WINE. - Cook ripe tomatoes until juice flows freely, mix one gallon water with one of juice; to each gallon of this mixture, add three water with one of juice; to each gallon of this mixture, add three pounds loaf sugar, let ferment, when lees sink to bottom, rack off and add more sugar if desirable; clarrify with white of egg or isinglass, after second fermentation.
VIRGINIA APPLE TODDY.-Half gallon apple brandy, half pint each French and peach brandy, and Maderia wine, six roasted apples, one pound sugar, with enough hot water to dissolve, add spice if wished, strain and bottle. This will keep improving for years.
WILD GRAPE WINE. - Use the small grapes, two pounds of white sugar to one gallon of juice, put in a cask cellar until spring, then rack off and bottle.
WILD GRAPE WINE. - Cleanse well a whole or half molasses barrel; take out one head and bore a half-inch hole just above the other or lower; cover bottom with clean sticks and cover these with fresh hay or straw two or three inches deep; pick grapes from stem, place in buckets and crush , gently so as not to break seed; stir occasionally until juice flows freely; measure grapes and juice; to each measure of these, add half of pure water; put all in barrrel and cover with false head weighted down enough to keep grapes from rising above juice; let stand three days, remove head when hulls will rise and juice settle; on the fourth day draw off juice through spile hole into buckets, (covered with flannel to strain) and to each gallon of juice add two and a half pounds of fine sugar; pour into casks or stone jugs; never demijohns; let ferment in a cool place ten or twelve days; draw off and clean vessel well, then burn a sulphur match in it and return wine while fumes of match are still in vessel; close mouth, leaving only a small gimlet hole covered with netting; after a time net may be removed and cork put loosely in; do not cork tightly for six months; it may then be bottled or kept in cask. For cultivated grape use same recipe, using neither sugar nor water, however. For Scuppernong and Whiscachine use no water, but two and a half pounds of sugar to the gallon. Blackberry wine made in the same way. This is the best plan for making • a large quantity of wine, and is certainly unequalled . - Mrs. Eckford, Atlanta, Ga.
This page runs several drink recipes together, and the first of them — the cider treatment — puts two substances into a barrel of drink that are no longer regarded as food. The rest of the page depends on unmeasured, untemperature-controlled fermentation and sulphur fumigation. Read it as a document, not as a working procedure.
- Oil of sassafrasSassafras oil is roughly 80 percent safrole, which the FDA banned from food and drink in 1960 after it was shown to cause liver tumours in animals. Commercially sold sassafras flavouring today is safrole-free and is not the same substance the recipe calls for.
- Oil of wintergreenMethyl salicylate is acutely toxic by mouth in small amounts — a single teaspoon is equivalent to a large overdose of aspirin, and fatal poisonings of children from it are well documented. A quarter ounce is roughly a teaspoon and a half, dispersed through a barrel whose volume the recipe never states. There is no way to know the dose per glass.
- The barrel is unstatedNothing here tells you whether the cider is five gallons or fifty. Every quantity on the first line is therefore uncalibrated, which is the practical reason the instruction cannot be followed even in principle.
- Sulphur match fumigationBurning sulphur in a cask produces sulphur dioxide, which winemakers still use as an antioxidant and antimicrobial, but modern practice doses it by weight in parts per million using metabisulphite. "Burn a sulphur match in it" gives no dose, and overdosing is both unpleasant and a genuine hazard for asthmatics.
- Open fermentation on hayOpen fermentation -- The grape-wine method ferments crushed fruit in a molasses barrel lined with fresh hay or straw, held down for three days under a weighted false head, with no sanitation beyond rinsing. Straw carries mould and spoilage organisms; a current winemaking recipe with measured acid, sulphite and sanitation should be used instead.
- Vocabulary, for readingLees are the sediment of dead yeast; to rack off is to siphon clear liquid off them. Loaf sugar is refined white sugar, sold as a hard cone and broken up. Isinglass is fish-swim-bladder gelatine, used as a fining agent. A spile hole is the small hole stopped with a wooden peg, or spile, bored here to draw off the juice; a demijohn is a large narrow-necked bottle, rejected here presumably because it cannot be cleaned or fumigated.
- Sugar-to-juice ratiosTwo to three pounds of sugar per gallon of juice is in the normal historical range for a country wine and reflects the low sugar of wild fox grapes and diluted tomato juice. Scuppernong, the Southern muscadine named for a North Carolina river, is sweet enough that the recipe drops the water but keeps the sugar.
Sweet cider turns to hard cider and then to vinegar on its own, and before refrigeration the whole problem of the autumn press was how to arrest it partway. Nineteenth-century household books are full of attempts — heating, sulphuring, mustard seed, and dosing with spirits and aromatic oils, as here, on the reasonable but unquantified theory that the essential oils would check the yeast. The same pages show how broad the Southern home-drink repertoire was: tomato wine, made where tomatoes were abundant and grapes were not; a Virginia apple toddy built on apple brandy and roasted apples, a drink often said to have originated in the eighteenth-century Virginia tavern and traditionally laid down to age for years; and two versions of wild grape wine from the native muscadine and fox grapes that grew in fencerows across Georgia and the Carolinas. The long final method, credited to Mrs. Eckford of Atlanta, is a farm-scale procedure rather than a kitchen one — a whole molasses barrel, a false head weighted down to keep the caps of skins submerged — and it belongs to the era when The Dixie Cook Book's readers still expected to put up their own liquor by the cask.