I didn’t make it to New York City for the first time until I was 27. Over the next two years or so I got very comfortable with the place, but at first I scarcely knew where to begin. Eating. Sure, pizza. Yeah, bagels. OK, a Nathan’s hot dog from the original stand on Coney […]
READ ONThe last thing I made — before I was so rudely interrupted by Mose and his cider-squeezing machine — was a rather frilly bit of French pastry shop pastry: Opera Cake. How fitting then that I should return to my request list to find something that really puts the “Joe” back in Joe Pastry: knishes. […]
READ ONSpeaking of strange cider rituals, this document, I’m told, details an old Welsh practice whereby a cake was placed on the head of a live cow, then a bucket of cider was poured over. If, when the cow shook its head, the cake fell forward, it meant good luck. If it fell back, bad luck. […]
READ ONMy post below unleashed a small flood of defiant emails stuffed with cider cake and cider bread recipes. I have only myself to blame. What I was thinking when I wrote what I wrote was simply that cider-based baking isn’t something you encounter much in books, for the reasons I discussed. That’s not to say […]
READ ONThat excellent question comes from reader Troy. The answer is: I don’t know. Sure, there are a few cider-based recipes in the baking world — cider doughnuts spring to mind — but by and large cider isn’t something bakers use very much. Mix it into a dough or batter instead of say, water or milk, […]
READ ONMaybe it’s the contemplative nature of autumn, perhaps its all this talk of cider and scrumpy, but I spent a good deal of the past weekend thinking about small town food traditions, especially the really odd ones I encountered while living in the Southwest of England. There it seems that every little hamlet you happen […]
READ ONWhat I meant to say is that there is also a longstanding farm cider-making tradition in France, as reader Clair reminds me: I live in a small French village in the heart of France and every year in October, there is a celebration of local autumn produce. Having read your post about apple juice and […]
READ ONYou pretty much just let the squeezings sit. That at least is what early Americans did. Given time (ten days or so), yeasts on the skin of the apple go to work consuming the sugars and giving off alcohol. But that’s just one possible way to go. In some cider-making traditions the fermentation is carried […]
READ ONOther than because that’s the way it makes you feel? “Scrumping” is actually a verb. It’s what you do when you’re passing by an orchard and it suddenly occurs to you that you’re hungry, but have no money to pay for fruit. Since there’s no one around, so you swipe it and run.
READ ONThere are a few places left on Earth where it’s possible to sample real farm cider. One of those is the Southwest of England, where I pleasantly passed a year of my undergraduate career. And when I say “passed” I mean only just barely, since so much of my time there was spent sampling Devon […]
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