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How to Imitate Cider
Champagne Cider.
This is a pale variety of cider, much used for "bottling," which has a great resemblance to inferior champagne. The following is a good form for a made cider of this class: 1 hhd. good pale vinous cider, 3 gals. pale proof spirits, 14 lbs. honey or sugar.
Mix well, and let them remain together for one month in a temperate situation; then add 3 pints double orange flower water, and in a few days fine it down with 1/2 gal. skimmed milk. This will give a very fine champagne cider.
Champagne Cider. (ANOTHER RECIPE.) 10 gallons of cider, old and clear.
Put it in a strong iron-bound cask, pitched inside (like beer-casks); add 2½ pints clarified white plain syrup, then dissolve in it 5 oz. tartaric acid; keep the bung ready in hand, then add 7½ ounces of bicarbonate of potassa; bung it as quickly and as well as possible. How to Imitate Cider.
A very fair imitation cider may be produced by using the following recipe : 25 gallons soft water, 2 lbs. tartaric acid, 66 25 New Orleans sugar, 1 pint yeast.
Put all the ingredients into a clean cask and stir them up well after standing 24 hours with the bung out. Then bung the cask up tight, add 3 gallons spirits, and let it stand 48 hours, after which time it will be ready for use.
Three trade formulas for cheap sparkling cider, aimed at a commercial cellar rather than a kitchen. They are worth reading as documents; two of the three carry real hazards, and one has lost a figure in the typesetting.
- The pressure hazardThe second formula generates carbon dioxide chemically: 5 oz tartaric acid and 7½ oz potassium bicarbonate in ten gallons of liquid, then bunged "as quickly and as well as possible." The charge builds pressure in a sealed vessel with no relief valve and no way to measure it, although the quantities given work out at a modest sparkle rather than champagne pressure.
- The garbled line"25 gallons soft water, 2 lbs. tartaric acid, 66 25 New Orleans sugar, 1 pint yeast" has what looks like the page number (66) set into the ingredient list, which would leave the 25 following it as the sugar quantity with the unit dropped. The figure cannot be confirmed, so do not guess at it; note also that 2 lb of tartaric acid in 25 gallons is a very sour base by any modern standard.
- An open fermentation, then spiritsThe imitation cider is sugar water pitched with yeast, left with the bung out for 24 hours, then bunged tight and fortified. There is no sanitation step, no temperature control and no fermentation endpoint; the recipe asks only for a clean cask. Twenty-four hours with the bung out leaves the liquid open to acetic and lactic spoilage organisms.
- HogsheadA hogshead is not a fixed volume, and the figures quoted for cider vary considerably between trades and regions. The first recipe's proportions cannot be scaled reliably without knowing which measure the author meant.
- Proof spirits"Pale proof spirits" means unaged neutral grain or grape spirit at proof strength, roughly 50 percent alcohol by volume in the American reckoning and about 57 percent under the older British system. Three gallons in a hogshead is a fortification, not a flavouring.
- Bicarbonate of potassaPotassium bicarbonate, still sold as a winemaking deacidifier. It is not an exotic poison; the problem here is the sealed vessel, not the salt.
- New Orleans sugarUnrefined or partly refined Louisiana cane sugar, dark, moist and molasses-heavy. Modern dark muscovado is the nearest thing on a shelf; ordinary brown sugar is refined white sugar with molasses added back.
- Fining with skimmed milkMilk casein was a standard clarifying agent for cider and pale wine, and skim milk fining is still used by some cidermakers. The text gives "gal." with the number missing, another dropped figure.
- Double orange flower waterA stronger preparation than the ordinary article, usually double-distilled, though no fixed strength is defined. Three pints of it in a hogshead is the only aromatic addition in the first formula.
"Champagne cider" was a nineteenth-century trade category rather than a style of apple growing: pale, dry cider sweetened, fortified, carbonated and bottled. Manuals of this kind, addressed to wine and liquor manufacturers rather than to households, sat in the grey zone between legitimate cellar practice and outright adulteration, and they circulated in the decades before food and drink labelling laws. The tartaric acid in the second and third formulas was a by-product of winemaking, refined from the argol deposited in casks. The frankness of the third recipe, which contains no apples at all, is the point: the author is not pretending, he is telling a bottler how to fill a demand for something that tastes like cider at the price of sugar, water and yeast.