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Cider Without Apples

A homemade cider made by fermenting water, sugar, tartaric acid, yeast, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cider Without Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Combine 1 gallon of cold water, 1 cup of common sugar, 1½ teaspoons of tartaric acid, and 1 tablespoon of yeast in a keg. Shake well.

  2. Let the mixture sit overnight; it will be ready for use the next day.

Make the batch

  1. For larger batches, mix 5 gallons of hot water with 15 cups of brown sugar, 2 cups of tartaric acid, and 25 gallons of cold water in a barrel.

  2. Create a paste with 3 pints of yeast, 2 cups of flour, and 1 pint of water, then add this to the barrel.

  3. Allow the mixture to work for 24 hours, topping off the barrel as needed.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the cider, adding 2 or 3 broken raisins to each bottle.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation.
Brown sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that the yeast converts during fermentation.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity, giving the drink a tart, cider-like bite.
Flour
Forms a paste with the yeast to help it disperse and start working.

“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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