Cider

 One of the treats of fall is cider.  Cider is made from raw apples, pressed to get out the juice, as opposed to apple juice, which is made by cooking up apples and straining out the solids to just have the juice.  Cider was also a favorite fall beverage in medieval Europe.

In fact, because apples then tended to be fairly small and sour by our standards (no Honeycrisp), cider was one of the main ways to get the goodness out of apples.  One crushed the apples, leaving core and peel behind along with the pulverized fruit (which could be then fed to the livestock or used for fertilizer).

 

Apples are not native to the New World, but Europeans brought them over.  The semi-legendary Johnny Appleseed grew up around his family's cider mill in the colonial era, and he thought it a shame that all those seeds went to waste,.  And thus he headed west with lots of seeds, figuring that if he planted them, they'd grow into trees, and as settlers moved west they'd be delighted to discover orchards already planted.  The village of Apple Creek, Ohio, is so named because indeed settlers at the beginning of the nineteenth century found many wild apple trees, attributed to ol' Johnny.

Now planting apple seeds is not necessarily a good way to get good apples.  Every seed is the result of a cross, and some of those crosses are a whole lot better than others.  (A wild apple tree grew in our back yard.  The apples were enormous, so you only needed one or two for a pie, but they were so tart you needed a whole lot of sugar.)  Modern varieties are proliferated strictly by grafting branches of the kind of apple you want onto some other apple tree's root stock.

At any rate, for many years, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, cider was a good way to use "drops," apples that had fallen and were probably bruised, as opposed to the perfect-looking ones that were picked.  These days most cider however is made from picked apples, because of understandable concern that drops might have picked up undesirable germs.  Cider made from drops is required to be pasteurized.

But there is nothing like the taste of good raw cider.  The downside is that it will ferment fairly quickly, especially if it cannot be kept refrigerated, an obvious challenge in the Middle Ages.  (Sometimes commercial cider will have potassium sorbate added to keep it from fermenting.  This is an abomination before the Lord.)  But that was fine!  Medieval people found "hard" cider a refreshing alternative to beer.

(A high school friend decided to secretly make her own hard cider. In those days cider came in glass bottles.  She hid a gallon of raw cider in her clothes closet, the lid screwed on tight.  The result, as they say, was not a pretty sight.)

These days in Britain "cider" means hard cider.  It has been pasteurized to stop the fermentation before the cider turns to vinegar (medieval cooks used cider vinegar is various dishes).  They also have hard pear cider, called perry.  But for Americans fresh (or "sweet") apple cider is a delicious taste of fall.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and drink, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Cider

One of the things you can do with apples is make cider.  It's the taste of fall (much more so than pumpkin spice latte.)  Cider was certainly drunk during the Middle Ages.  In fact, because medieval apples were much smaller than modern apples, they were more likely to be made into cider than eaten raw.

That's a picture of a modern apple.  Medieval apples would have been closer in size to what we call a crab apple.

Making cider is not very difficult.  Chop the apples coarsely, press the pieces (as in a cider mill), catch the juice as it comes out, strain it to get out seeds, stems, etc.  That's it!  Now you have good raw cider.  It needs to be kept cool or drunk immediately.  This is the cider you get at a cider mill today, and the cider that medieval people made.

Most of the cider you get in the grocery store has been pasteurized so it won't ferment the way raw cider will, and it often contains a small amount of chemicals also designed to preserve it.  I personally can always taste the chemicals and consider them an affront against nature.

So how did medieval people preserve cider?  Well, it was fall, so the spring house would be fairly cool, for at least a few days' preservation.  But much of it fermented, and that was fine too.  It was drunk as hard cider, an alternative to beer.  (Like medieval beer, it still couldn't be kept very long, because pasteurization and bottling were centuries in the future.)  In Great Britain, if you now order cider in a bar you will get what Americans consider hard cider, and the Brits don't really drink what Americans consider regular cider.

Fun fact:  Cider is not the same as apple juice.  Apple juice is made not by pressing raw apples but by boiling up apples, then straining off the resulting liquid.  Perfectly OK but not as good as cider.

Another fun fact:  Johnny Appleseed was a real person, back around 1800.  His father had a cider mill.  He thought it important that, as pioneers headed west, they should be able to have apple trees.  So every year he took a whole lot of seeds from the cider mill and headed west, ahead of the settlers, and planted apple trees.  They resulting trees were all sorts of weird hybrids, but you could always make cider.  The village of Apple Creek in Ohio is so named because when the white settlers arrived, there were already Johnny Appleseed trees along the creek.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on food and drink in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.