Boiled cider captures the essence of apples, in syrup form

But by the ’60s, boiled cider had become anachronistic, even in Vermont, where it had once been so deeply ingrained in local cookery. “Our customers in the old days,” said Willis, “were little old ladies with tight blue curls.” He speculates, too, that boiled cider further lost appeal as Americans shied increasingly away from the kitchen. “Boiled cider is meant to be cooked with, and people gave up cooking,” he said.

And then sometime during the last decade, boiled cider drew a new fan base: a largely younger one, keen on small-batch food production and eager to restore the food traditions that industrialization had left behind.

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(Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Boiled Cider

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“We’re beginning to recapture the apple culture of the past, and also to reinvent a new apple culture, which is so exciting for me,” says Tom Burford, an orchardist and apple historian who has been working to preserve biodiversity in the apple orchard for decades. When he operated a nursery with his brother near Monroe, Va., featuring nearly 500 varieties, a few of those were especially dear, their individual characteristics respected for very particular applications.

“My mother lived to be 99 years old,” Burford said. “And even in her 90s, she would always remind me to make sure I set aside two bushels of Virginia Beauty apples, to make boiled cider.”

Burford grew up in Amherst County, Va., an area once rife with orchards and still wealthy in apple production. In his childhood home, boiled cider always shared space with a bottle of hard cider on the back of the wood-burning stove. They were both used for cooking — or, when snow started to fall, in hot toddies that took the place of summer’s mint juleps. Equal parts boiled cider, hard cider and applejack, Appalachia’s once-illicit apple brandy, mellowed the chill and the temperament. (Burford recalls a friend of his father who suggested the toddies be boiled vigorously so that the children could drink them, too. Burford’s father, for his part, always gave his children the real thing.) “I have apple juice in my veins, really.”

Boiled cider can be difficult to find in the mid-Atlantic, but you can mail-order it from Wood’s (www.woodscidermill.com) or make it at home, which is straightforward enough: You’re just reducing fresh apple cider to about one-seventh of its original volume, trading a few hours of indolent stirring for a scent of caramelized apples that will linger twice as long as that.

Ideally you would use a varietal cider that smacks of tartness, such as one made of Winesaps or Crispins (also known as Mutsus), but that’s a trick unless you can find someone to custom-press a batch for you, because most ciders available these days are blends.

If that’s not an option, Burford suggests seeking out a cider with a little tang, which will sound the right notes when boiled into syrup: aromatic, bright, piercing. It’s autumn, on call.

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Boiled Cider

Boiled Cider Baked Beans