Cider: Newly made sweet cider is both pleasant and healthful, and is a
useful ingredient in some culinary preparations; but it should be used
fresh from the press or not more than twenty-four hours old. To make it,
cut out all the rotten and bruised spots, also the worms and their
burrows. To make cider or vinegar from rotten and wormy apples ought to
be considered a crime. The famous Russet cider of New York is made from
sound Russet apples and brings top price.
Sweet cider may be canned or bottled and will keep interminably, if
heated to 160 degrees and kept hot for twenty minutes, then canned and
sealed as for fruit.
Boiled cider, that is, reduced to one-fifth by boiling, and canned, is a
nice article for culinary use, for making apple-butter, apple-sauce and
in apple or mince pies. It would sell.
Cider vinegar is the best for home use and market. No one having an
apple orchard should ever buy vinegar, and ought to have some to sell to
neighbors or at the stores. To make: Sweet cider carefully made should
be placed in clean, sweet, oak barrels, placed in a room where sun and
frost cannot reach it. The barrels should be laid on their sides, with
the open bung-hole upward, and double mosquito net or wire tacked over
it. It requires from eighteen months to two years to become first class,
but there is no more labor excepting to rack or siphon it off from the
sediment; do not be impatient; make some every year, and if you are a
"rustler" you will make good money out of it. Our home demand requires
over 50,000 barrels per month.
Apple-butter, to be good, requires boiled cider, and if to the boiled
cider is added the good parts of the best culls, and carefully and
skilfully boiled, either with or without spices, it sells for one dollar
per gallon and is very profitable.
Dried apples: The best of the culls, carefully trimmed, peeled, cored,
and quartered or sliced, may be dried in the sun and air anywhere in
Kansas. A cheap rack of poles or slats three or four feet above the
ground, a lot of trays made of lath with muslin bottoms and plenty of
mosquito netting to spread on hoops or bars above the fruit to keep off
flies, are all that is needed. Do not leave them spread out during rain,
or at night. The trays can be piled at night, with the fruit in them,
under a shed or cover. Keep all vermin from them and stir often.
Evaporated apples sell better, and by many are preferred. [I like the
sun-kissed ones the best.--Sec.] There are numerous patent evaporators,
all very good; but any ingenious man can make his own. The evaporators
in which the Wellhouse culls are dried are very simple. President
Wellhouse says he spent over $2,500 on patent dryers without any
satisfaction, and then built his own, which are described elsewhere.