ISSUE 67, ARK OF TASTE, Part 5: Boiled Cider
Boiled Cider
Boiled cider is a reduction of sweet cider, the unfermented juice of the harvest apple crush. Produced at home at farmsteads with apple orchards, and by regional commercial food producers in the mid-1800s, boiled cider became pantry staple. It was the secret to superior apple sauce, the heart of cider pie, the ideal glaze for baked hams, the substitute for brandy in mincemeat pie in New England temperance families, and a flavor boost for apple butter. The flavor of boiled cider depended on which apples one grew for cider-making. Usually there was a mix: tannic crab apples, sweet juice apples, and acid cider apples. Each region had its favorites, indeed each household. But when the fresh juice was boiled down from four gallons to one, the natural sugars in the fruit became so concentrated that one needed no admixture of granulated sugar. It was as dulcet and perfumed as any confection. If one reduced it further over heat, the pectins in the fruit would begin to solidify, and depending on the varieties, would coalesce into cider jelly.
In the colonial period and the first half of the nineteenth century the boiling took place in iron cauldrons suspected over fires in farm yards. In the mid-19th century when sugar refineries proved the greater temperature control of pan evaporation, sweet cider boilers producing on a commercial scale adopted the shallow metal pans. They prevented the cider molasses from scorching, a problem with round-bottomed cooking vessels. Home processors working on a stove top used brass or porcelain reducing kettles. Whether one reduced in a pan or in a kettle, one had to skim of the scum of starches forming on the surface of the boil. Best results arose from cooking long over a moderate well-tended fire. It was stored in glass jars or stoneware jugs.
While often associated in the public mind with New England, boiled cider was made and used in every region in the United States that hosted extensive apple orchards. It was as much an Appalachian staple as a Vermont farmstead mainstay. The ingredient’s heyday was in the 19th century, before the rise of food processing companies that filled grocery stores with applesauce and apple confectioners sweetened with sugar. Beginning in the 1890s, newspapers began publishing stories about how boiled cider had become rare. “Cider molasses, or as it is sometimes and more often called, ‘boiled cider,’ thirty or forty years ago, was considered one of the necessary stores to lay by when apples were plenty . . . . It was usually done out of doors, and the process was necessarily so slow that it was rarely that enough would be made to any more than supply the household necessities. Consequently it was rarely thrown upon the market, which may account for its not becoming a commodity for which there is now a steady demand. [“Wilmantic Letter,” Hartford Courant (October 9, 1891).] Prior to Prohibition, the one dependable source for boiled cider was one’s local cider mill. After 1920 one had to depend on small regional retail producers: Red Jacket Brand, Richelieu,
Throughout the twentieth century there were a succession of small scale producers that kept bottles of boiled cider stocked on regional grocery shelves, particularly in autumn: Red Jacket Brand, Richelieu, Greenwood Farm Northfield MA and Woods Cider Mill in Weathersfield, Vermont. Woods’s boiled cider made from various McIntosh lines boiled tin a 7 to 1 reduction is the most famous artisanal product currently available. King Arthur Flour also provides a very useful line of boiled cider a shade less thick than Woods’s.
As the Vermonter who nominated boiled cider to be boarded on the Ark of Taste observed, “In appearance, boiled cider is a dark reddish brown color, opaque like molasses, and with the consistency of syrup. It has a clear and concentrated aroma of apples, and its dark, caramelized sweetness is typically balanced by a sharp acidity – the result of the good sugar/acid balance found in most North American dessert apples.” It is by no means cloying in its sweetness, and has won a following among bakers who substitute boiled cider for sugar or honey in recipes to impart a greater olfactory charge and moistness to baked goods. Fruit cakes moistened with boiled cider take on legendary depth of flavor. Classic apple cakes double their impact with boiled cider is substituted for black strap molasses or simple syrup.
In the repertoire of boiled cider cookery, several classic dishes stand out: boiled cider apple sauce, cider pie, cider baked beans, dried apple cake, and mock-mince meat pie. But the revival of regional cookery in the 2010s had chefs experimenting with boiled cider in unprecedented ways, employing it in brines for meat or as a glaze when broiling fish. Mixologists began formulating seasonal cocktails with a “sweet apple kiss.”
Boiled cider when reduced to about 9 to 1 transmutes to cider jelly. The classic recipe made no use of either sugar or gelatin in the formula. The natural pectins and fructose of the apples supplied both the solidity and sweetness. While both apple jelly and boiled cider are shelf stable at room temperature when properly set in jars, old cook books are quite insistent that jelly be used quickly; that both perfume and flavor declined with long sitting. One mark of the “sugaring of America” can be seen in the penchant over the course of the twentieth century to add sugar to the mixture to make cider jelly more pronouncedly sweet. There are, however, artisanal producers who have resisted the trend and offer the pristine original: Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Stowe Vermont and Wood’s Cider Mill are both dependable suppliers.