The apple, a humble fruit native to Central Asia, has come a long way to become part of the fall fantasies of New Englanders. Almost as a ritual, when temperatures start to drop and leaves change color, people from the North East of the United States, peregrinate to the multiple apple orchards that populate the landscape.
I had my rite of passage last year and I intend to join the tradition every fall for as long as I am around the region. It is perhaps one of the few times city people get in touch with agricultural practices. It is framed as a social event in which you take a trip with family and friends and spend some time in nature joyfully filling a bag with harvested apples that will for sure be much pricier than in any supermarket. It’s a social event that changes the urban landscape for the orchard: you walk around the trees, you witness how the fruit emerges miraculously from the branches and at some point, you also get tired.
Agriculture is labour intensive. Even in the cases in which the aid of machines can harvest thousands of fruits at once (reducing, therefore, the price per bag). Hand picking is something of a romanticised past, but being there, in the middle of the orchard brings a chance to connect you with how food gets to your plate, or hands in this case.
The day I stopped by at Burtt’s Apple Orchard during my trip to Vermont I was not there to pick apples, though we certainly did. I was there to research (and eat) an autumnal treat all New Englanders love, and it comes directly from this mysterious fruit: the cider donut.
What is a Cider Donut
A cider donut is a cake-like donut flavoured with apple cider and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, enhancing its warm, autumnal flavor. Traditionally it is deep-fried and the perfect finish is a sweet dust of cinnamon sugar, though some will argue that it’s even better glazed.
You’ll find them in any apple orchard during the harvest season from Connecticut to Maine and even if you can also buy them at farmer’s markets, local bakeries and Trader Joe’s, I think it’s best to eat them right there, close to the lines of apple trees for a full-circle moment.
When was it invented
The cider donut is a much more modern invention than people generally like to think, though the main elements came with the first pilgrims from the Old World.
“Deep-fried balls of dough are found in almost all cultures” says writer Heather Delancey Hunwick in Doughnut: A Global History. Think of a churro, buñuelo, beignet, lokma, gulab jamun, sfenj, zulbia, krapfen or a pet de nonne (literally a “nun’s fart”).
In European countries, the fat of use to fry the dough was lard and the time to enjoy the fritters Carnival. For Catholics, this festivity was about celebration and gluttony and presided Lent, a time for repentance of all sins committed. Still nowadays if you visit a Catholic country for Carnival you’ll be able to enjoy many traditional fried pastries. Knowing the long 40 days of Lent would be without any meat products, there was a need to utilise the excess of hog fat from the winter butchering season: so they fried dough with it. And in England, from where the first pilgrims came from, people celebrated Shrove Tuesday with pancakes and fritters.
“As a rule, the Puritans didn’t go in much for fun of any sort. Certainly donuts weren’t associated with pleasure-filled holidays as they were in Europe. The settlers of Plymouth Rock tolerated no Saints’ Day processions, no Christmas festivals, and certainly no cross-dressing for Carnival. Eating and drinking were allowed - just as long as you didn’t enjoy them too much- but heaven forfend that a raucous feast should have anything to do with religion. The result of this was that special-occasion foods, like donuts, lost their holiday associations. Instead, they became an everyday treat, to me munched on morning, noon, and night.” Michael Krondl, The Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin
According to Washington State University, only 9 years after arriving to Plymouth (MA) in 1620, European colonists planted apple trees in the new colony and it didn’t take long until they started producing cider, as they would back in England. It became one of their primary beverages: it was cheap, easy to make, safer than water and used up all the extra apples that would otherwise go bad.
Puritans didn’t have much fun, but they had donuts. Or dough-nuts, little balls (nuts) of dough to be fried up. Since fall was the time for slaughtering animals, there was an excess of leftover fat from the butchering process, which was perfect for frying dough. And after a bountiful fall harvest, there was also excess of apples that were combined with the fried dough to create a sort of apple fritter.
Peter Rose, a food historian mentioned that “doughnuts, as we know them now, are a product of the 19th century, so by then local cooks/bakers used and experimented with local ingredients available to them”. So the cider donut, pouring some sweet cider into the donut dough, was a natural step. They were homemade snacks elaborated during fall and eaten as treats for Halloween.
But the modern popularisation of the cider donut didn’t come until later. We should thank Adolph Levitt, a Russian immigrant based in NYC that founded the Doughnut Corporation of America (DCA) in the 1920s. “He launched a chain of doughnut shops, developed a doughnut-making machine and a standardized a mix of ingredients to sell to other bakeries, and came up with National Donut Month and a host of other marketing gimmicks.” Says writer Amanda Fiegl for Smithsonian Magazine.
Food historian Michael Krondl explained to NPR that at the same time there was another phenomenon happening: the rise of the automobile. “It's the collision of the automobile, automation and advertising. You've got these machines in every donut shop in America, and the Doughnut Corporation of America is controlling them. And you begin to have these farm stands, particularly near urban areas, where people can go on a Sunday drive. People would do that in the early days of the automobiles — excursions.”
Day-trippers from urban areas would arrive hungry at the orchards and then have a freshly but automatically made donut ready to be enjoyed. And perfectly accompanied by hot or cold cider pressed in the same farm. Sounds familiar, right?
That company would introduce a new donut variety each year and on 1951 they decided to include the cider donut, which was then made popular to the wider public, revealing an until then New England’s kept secret.
“A new type of product, the Sweet Cider Doughnut will be introduced by the Doughnut Corporation of America in its twenty-third annual campaign this fall to increase doughnut sales. The new item is a spicy round cake that is expected to have a natural fall appeal.” The New York Times, August 19, 1951
The production of cider in New England
The trip I took around Vermont (more on that on next week’s newsletter) brought us to many cider shops. Vermont is well known in the area for its crafted ciders and beers and we stopped at as many as possible to understand and taste all the differences.
Before sitting down and researching the history of cider, I was confused by two things: why here it is served in cans as if it was a beer while in Northern Spain the serving or escanciado is quite ritualistic having to do it raising your arm so the pour is from a distance? And are cider donuts made with fermented cider as well?
I asked this second question to Greg, owner of Burtt’s Apple Orchard in Cabot, Vermont. He clarified that most apple cider donuts, and certainly his, are made with sweet cider, which is not fermented. Differently than in Europe, where all non-fermented apple juice is known as “apple juice”, in the United States, they make a differentiation between the one that has been filtered (juice) and the one that has not been processed at all and maintains its sediments and pulp (cider). “Cider" here doesn’t necessarily mean fermented apple juice. Hence my confusion.
This sweet cider can be found in apple orchards and farms and it’s normally not processed at all, therefore it has a short shelf life. In Burrt’s Apple Orchard they served it as a slushy, which was very nice to try because during our visit in early September it still felt warm. Many other orchards offer a hot mulled cider variety, in which the sweet apple cider is cooked with spices to enhance its fall warmth.
The term sweet cider contrasts with the hard cider. Which is what Ross and I had been tasting all around the state of Vermont and also here in Massachusetts many times in our local pub.
Hard cider is consumed in western Europe, in areas where apples grow naturally. Like Normandy and Brittany, in France; England (which has the highest per capita consumption of the world) and Asturias and País Vasco in Spain. Having apple trees available, the purposeful fermented juice was only an obvious step in all these areas and their traditions date back thousands of years.
Some of my best memories of my time spent around San Sebastian, in Northern Spain, are around sharing a bottle of sidra with friends. The first few times, the waiter would serve it for us, but later on we felt like pros escanciando the beverage from a meter above the glass. I also hold a special memory of going to a sidrería with my friend Luz that was visiting from France while I was there finishing my Master’s in Food Journalism. A sidrería is a traditional cider house, often also a restaurant where only a couple of dishes are served and people share long communal tables. The space if filled with huge oak barrels, each containing fermented cider. One must take their own glass and serve themselves from the barrel while trying not to contribute more to the sticky cider floor.
My experience with fermented cider here in New England has been very different. You don’t need to serve it from a heigh, which in Spain it is done to introduce air and effervescence to the cider, because most ciders here are already a bit fizzy. This is because in the States sugar is added to the process, which helps increase the fermentation and create bubbles. Actually, they are normally also enhanced with different ingredients creating unique flavors that each brand of cider considers unique.
In Spain, cider is made with very specific apples, normally more acidic and tannic, that are also indigenous varieties. Fermentation is produced spontaneously with yeast present on the apples and it can last for months. Often cider is also aged in oak barrels to develop a more complex flavor.
In New England generally both sweet and sour varieties are used and fermentation is controlled with commercial yeasts. The cider is also pasteurised to achieve a more uniform finish. Here you can find many more flavor profiles, from dry to sweet and from hoppy (with added hops) to fruity and spiced (with added fruits or fall spices).
“Cidermakers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa are free to innovate because they are not bound by centuries of established cidermaking tradition. If the product meets the legal definition of cider and can be sold at a reasonable profit, the sky is the limit.” Eric West, Cider Guide.
Further reading:
DELANCEY HUNWICK, Heather, Doughnut: A Global History (Edible Series, The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
KRONDL, Michael, The Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin (Chicago Review Press, 2014)
STEWART, Amy, "The History of Cider Making" (Utne Reader, June 2013)
I had no idea apple cider doughnuts have been around for this long and I'd to think that the the inspiration for apple cider bundt cakes stems from the apple cider doughnut.
Burtt’s doughnuts are the best!