Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This page describes additives or treatments for food or drink that are now known to be toxic and are prohibited in food today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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On the Management of Cider
CIDER should be stored in a cool place, and should not be drank before it becomes sufficiently matured. To improve the flavor of a hogshead of cider, 1½ gals. of good brandy or rum are frequently added, with 2 oz. powdered catechu (dissolved in water), 7 lbs. good moist sugar or honey, 1/2 oz. each, bitter almonds and cloves, and 4 oz. mustard seed. These must be well stirred in, and occasionally stirred up for a fortnight, after which it must be allowed to repose for three or four months, when it will usually be found as bright as wine. Should this not be the case, it must be fined with a pint of isinglass finings, or a dozen of eggs, and in two weeks more it will be fit for use. If the cider be preferred pale, omit the catechu, and instead of the isinglass fine with one quart of skimmed milk. If wanted of a light reddish or rose tint, use 1/2 oz. of cochineal, and omit the catechu. Preparatory to bottling cider, it should be examined to see whether it is clear and sparkling; if not, it should be clarified again, and left for two weeks. The night before it is intended to be put into bottles, the bung should be left out of the cask, and left so until the next day, when it may be bottled, but not corked down until the day after, as, if this be done at once, many of the bottles will burst by keeping. The best corks and champagne bottles should be used, and it is usual to wire and cover the corks with tin foil, after the manner of champagne. A few bottles may be kept in a warm place to ripen, or a small piece of lump sugar may be put into each bottle before corking, if wanted for immediate use, or for consumption during the cooler portion of the year; but for warm weather and for long keeping this is inadmissible. The bottled stock should be stored in a cool cellar, where the quality will be greatly improved by age. Cider for bottling should be of good quality, and at least twelve months old.
The above is considered the best way of managing cider; but there is another method esteemed by many, which we also give as follows. It is in use in Eng land:
The cider is placed in a situation where the temperature does not exceed 45°, which retards the fermentation through November and December. It is generally put into a well sulphured cask, with 3 or 4 oz. mustard seed and 1 lb. cloves added, both well bruised. In this way the fermentation is retarded till March, when it becomes pungent and vinous. Should fermentation at any time appear to be taking place, the cider should be racked, and one gallon of spirits added. This should be repeated as often as fermentation is perceptible. In nine months it will usually be in condition for bottling or drinking; if it continues thick, use some isinglass finings; and if at any time it ferments and threatens acidity, the cure is to rack it, and leave the head and sediment behind.
To Improve New Cider.
When the cask is deposited where you intend it to remain, start the bung, and put into the liquor 8 ounces of stone brimstone; then stop it up for a week. Tincture a gallon of French brandy highly with cochineal, pour it into the cider, stir well, and in twenty-four hours afterwards add a pound of alum and four pounds of sugar-candy, both beaten fine, and mixed well. Stop it up securely, and in three months bottle it, using the best corks; wire and seal. These quantities are calculated for a hogshead, and will not only greatly improve the the flavor and color of the liquor, but adapt it for keeping a long time. To Fine Cider.
Cider should be fined with isinglass the same as white wines and malt liquors. (See page 170.) Concluding Remarks.
Much of the excellence of cider depends upon the temperature at which the fermentation is conducted; a point utterly overlooked by the manufacturers of this liquor. nstead of the apple juice, as soon as it is expressed from the fruit, being placed in a cool situation, where the temperature should not exceed 50° or 52° Fah., it is frequently left exposed to the full heat of autumn. In this way much of the alcohol formed by the decomposition of the sugar is converted into vinegar, by the absorption of atmospheric oxygen, and thus the liquor acquires that peculiar and unwholesome acidity known as "hardness" or "roughness." When, on the contrary, the fermentation is conducted at a low temperature, nearly the whole of the sugar is converted into alcohol, and this remains in the liquor, instead of undergoing the process of acetification. The acetous fermentation, by which alcohol is converted into vinegar, proceeds most rapidly at a temperature of about 90° Fah., and at lower temperatures, the action becomes gradually slower, until at 46° to 50° Fah., no such change takes place. It is therefore evident, that if the saccharine juice of apples, or any other fruit, is made to undergo the vinous fermentation in a cool situation, less of the spirit resulting from the transformation of the sugar will be converted into acetic acid, and, consequently, more will be retained in an unaltered state in the liquor to improve its quality, and, by its conservative and chemical action, to preserve it from future change. This is the principal cause, other circumstances being alike, of the difference in the quality of the cider made by persons living in the same district. The one has probably a cooler barn and cellar than the other to store his liquor in, and is more careful to keep the pulp and juice cool during the early part of the process.
This is a trade manual's account of doctoring and bottling bulk cider, and several of the additives it calls for are poisons rather than ingredients. The notes below explain the specific problems and the archaic measures, not how to reproduce the work.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly the conditions here. Unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold as food in the United States, and steeping them in a cask of cider extracts the toxin into the drink.
- A pound of alum per hogsheadAluminium potassium sulphate was a standard nineteenth-century clarifier and astringency-faker. A pound dissolved in a cask of this size is far above any level now permitted in a beverage, and alum at that dose is a gastric irritant. It was one of the classic adulterants that food-purity legislation was written to stop.
- "Stone brimstone" in the liquidSulphur is legitimately burned in an empty cask to sterilise it — that is what "a well sulphured cask" means. Dropping 8 oz of lump sulphur into the cider itself is a different act, and it produces uncontrolled quantities of sulphur dioxide and sulphides in the finished drink with no way to measure the result.
- Catechu and cochinealCatechu, the tannin-rich extract of Acacia catechu, was used to imitate the body and colour of aged cider; cochineal to fake a rose tint. Both are colouring frauds rather than flavour work, and the catechu here is a bulk astringent added at a rate no modern producer would use.
- The warning at the head of the pageThe editorial note about salicylic acid, borax and formaldehyde belongs to the book's era of chemical preservation. Salicylic acid and formaldehyde were used to check fermentation in cider and beer, borax more often in milk, butter and meat, and all three are prohibited in food and drink now.
- Hogshead, and why the scale mattersA hogshead varied by trade and region; the wine hogshead was 63 gallons, and cider casks were often reckoned larger. The two doctoring recipes give their quantities for a hogshead, so the additive concentrations are not obvious from the figures as written — which is part of how such recipes passed as reasonable.
- Bottling under pressureThe instruction to leave bottles uncorked a day, then wire and foil champagne corks, reflects the real risk the author names: bottles bursting. Sugar added at bottling in a cask of unknown residual yeast and gravity is an uncontrolled secondary fermentation, and glass failure was common enough that the book hedges against warm weather.
- What is sound in the pieceThe concluding remarks on temperature are good observation. Cool fermentation at 50–52°F and cold storage genuinely do suppress acetic bacteria, which work fastest near 90°F, and that part of the text reads as well now as it did then. For actually making cider, use a current recipe.
This is a manufacturer's manual rather than a housekeeper's book, and it shows: the object is not to make good cider but to make indifferent cider sell, by adding spirit for strength, sugar or honey for body, catechu or cochineal for colour, and alum for the astringent "bite" of age. Cider was the everyday drink of apple-growing districts on both sides of the Atlantic through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the wholesale trade in it was notoriously adulterated — the same period that produced Accum's and Hassall's exposés of doctored bread, tea and beer. Fining with isinglass (swim-bladder gelatine), skimmed milk or beaten egg was standard and harmless practice, borrowed straight from the wine cellar; it is the alum, brimstone and bitter almonds that mark the page as pre-regulation. The final section, on conducting fermentation cool to keep alcohol from turning to vinegar, explains acetification as the absorption of atmospheric oxygen, and its complaint that temperature is "utterly overlooked by the manufacturers of this liquor" was fair comment on an industry that fermented its juice in open autumn barns.