Apple cider press in 1840s Germany

The lovely long curved oak trough and millstone, apple press, and 'monstrous tuns' were used to turn the "golden apples" into "apple-wine" or cider.  Cows pulled the wagons during the harvest.

"Wagons are standing under the road-side apple trees, with their patient cows, awaiting their loads. The families are all abroad, father, mother, and children, collecting their stores. Baskets full of ruddy apples are standing about, and showers of golden apples are lying in the green grass. A great portion of this fruit is intended for cider, or as they call it, apple-wine, for their own consumption.

You see the millstone and long axle at work out of doors, crushing the apples in along oaken trough made for the purpose, and the presses at work in their outbuildings pressing out the juice.

As you pass their cottages, you see the cellars, which generally open to the front, with doors set wide, and the huge tun which holds the family wine. The cider, which would be excellent if properly kept, and bottled at the right time, so as to be sparkling, must become dreadfully flat as drawn out of these monstrous tuns; but this flatness is probably much to their taste. It is the same which prevails generally with a good share of acidity in their wines, which might, if they pleased, be brisk as champagne; but it was not till lately that they acted on this idea, and established German champagne breweries, where now much is made of a very tolerable quality."
Howitt, William.  The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany.  London: 1842

The trough obsolete by 1869 in the US

The earliest appliance known, which in this day of improvement has become obsolete, and which would require an extremely fertile imagination to designate a mill, was simply a trough, in which the apples were reduced to an imperfect pomace by rolling them with a heavy cylindrical stone, or by pounding them as in a mortar.

Buell, Jonathan.  The Cider Makers' Manual: A Practical Hand-book.  Buffalo: 1869   89p.

©2017 Patricia Bixler Reber
Researching Food History HOME