To Keep Cider Sweet
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Put 8 gallons of cider into a clean barrel.
Mix powdered charcoal and sulfur together.
Place the mixture in an iron vessel that fits through the barrel's bung-hole.
Sweeten the cider
Insert a red-hot iron into the mixture and lower it into the barrel, suspending it about 1 foot above the cider.
After 12 hours, remove the iron and repeat for another batch.
Seal the barrel tightly and store in a cool cellar.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Cider
- Is the liquid being sweetened and carries the final flavour of the drink.
- Powdered sulfur
- Burns when heated over the red-hot iron, producing sulfur dioxide fumes that act on the cider.
- Powdered charcoal
- Mixed with the sulfur so the mixture burns steadily over the hot iron, releasing fumes into the barrel.
The step that matters
Keeping the iron above the cider. The iron must be suspended about 1 foot above the liquid rather than dropped in. The fumes need to rise and contact the cider without the hot metal touching it, which would cause uncontrolled heating and splashing.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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