THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 23, 1994 TAG: 9411190202
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: COVER STORY
SOURCE: BY MARY REID BARROW, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 138 lines
WHEN GUESTS ARRIVE for Thanksgiving dinner at Juanita and Dave ``Tony'' Swoope's home, the spicy aroma of cinnamon and apples will be wafting through the house and they'll be greeted with cups of hot homemade cider straight from the Swoope's own cider press.
Flavored with cinnamon sticks and cinnamon candy hearts, the cider will be more than homemade. It also will be home grown, because the juice comes from apples that ripened on the Swoopes' own trees in their Gum Bridge Road yard.
``I'll give them cider to warm them up before we eat,'' Swoope said.
Homemade cider also will be a winter warm-up treat and a part of holiday festivities for Mike and Toni Eaton, Jim and Jackie Hertz, and for Jan and Joy Eliassen. The four couples are among folks living down in old Princess Anne County who raise their own apples and hand crank their own cider each fall.
Mike Eaton is the old hand at cider making. He's been producing his own thick, sweet apple juice for 20 or so years now. Eaton uses a cider press that is a much older hand at pressing cider than even he. Manufactured in 1866, the press once belonged to Eaton's father, who restored and rebuilt it.
Eaton has 25 trees bearing a variety of apples at his home on West Landing Road. Recently he made his last batch of cider from late ripening Granny Smith apples. His apple press was set up outside on the garage apron and his wife Toni was at the ready with plastic buckets and jugs. With his right hand Eaton began turning the wheel that meshed the gears that rotated the thick-bladed apple grinder round and round. With his left hand he started tossing green Granny Smith apples into the hopper, skins, stems and all.
Sounding as if a giant were taking oversize apple bites, the blade began crunching the fruit apart. A bottomless basket, made of wooden staves that looked as old as the press itself, awaited the apple pieces.
As the basket piled up with sweet-smelling apple grindings, little yellow bees drawn by the aroma began buzzing around the press.
Eaton slid the full basket out from under the hopper to the end of a trough where Toni Eaton was waiting with a plastic bucket.
``It's like opening the gates to the dike and letting the water rush through,'' Eaton said as he began to screw the wooden ``top,'' which operated like a vise down onto the basket.
As he tightened the screw, the top ``pressed'' down onto the apples and a river of golden juice poured from the bottom and down a spout.
Toni Eaton strained the cider as it flowed into her bucket and using a funnel, she then poured the cider into plastic gallon milk jugs.
``You've got to have 10 hands,'' she said, as she held the bucket between her knees in order to hold the funnel upright in the jug.
Toni Eaton used to pasteurize the cider by heating and canning it, but no longer. ``It never tasted as good,'' she said.
Now, they either drink it fresh, straight from the press, or store it in their freezer to prevent it from fermenting and turning into hard cider. ``Hard cider'' is the term for cider with some percentage of alcohol.
``When it gets hard, it gets bitey,'' Mike Eaton said. ``So we freeze it in plastic milk bottles, the quicker the better.''
``We have it for breakfast and if it's hot, we drink it like water,'' Toni Eaton added. ``We heat it up and drink it like mulled wine with whole cloves, cinnamon sticks and lemonade.''
On the other hand, the Hertzes like their cider fresh and they like it hard, too.
For the holidays, they'll serve their cider hot with the spicy taste of cinnamon but it will have a little of that alcoholic bite to it, too.
Like the Eatons, the Hertzes freeze their sweet cider. Cider in the refrigerator will begin to harden within two weeks. The secret to keeping hard cider tasting fresh, Jim Hertz thinks, is to store it at a cold 30 to 40 degrees.
``It hardens,'' he said, ``but it stays sweet rather than going sour.''
Jim Hertz could walk out of the pages of a Whole Earth Catalog. He likes to do things the old-fashioned way. Pressing his cider, too, with an antique press is just one of many back-to-the-past activities he does around the farm on Muddy Creek Road. He dries his own figs and apples, shells and grinds corn and has even made his own sausages.
The Eliassens don't own a cider press, but that doesn't stop them from gathering up apples they grow down on Mill Landing Road and taking them to a friend's cider press in Chesapeake. There the Eliassen's make cider but that is just the beginning of the cider season for the couple.
They drink it fresh straight from the press and they also let some of it go ``hard'' the natural way.
Then Jan Eliassen makes a wine akin to Apple Jack Brandy by adding yeast, sugar and raisins and letting the mixture bubble away for several weeks. Joy Eliassen is the cordial maker in the family. She adds ingredients such as vodka or brandy and sugar to the cider to come up with a variety of sweet after-dinner drinks.
``We sip it every once in a while,'' Jan Eliassen said, ``and share it with friends. It's a novelty.''
When it comes to cider making there are no rules or regulations. Everyone agrees that a mixture of apple varieties makes the best cider, but it's really each to his own taste.
``We even mixed in some pears this year,'' Juanita Swoope said, ``and it is wonderful.''
Jan Eliassen grew up on a Maryland farm where his family made cider. Tony Swoope also grew up in a cider-making family in the mountains of Virginia, but cider pressing is not an old Princess Anne County tradition.
Even though Mike Eaton's father had the cider press restored, Eaton never remembers his father and other hard-working farmers here taking the time to do a little recreational pressing of their own.
But the Hertzes already have introduced a lot of youngsters at Charity United Methodist Church Preschool to cider making. Every fall, the children take a field trip to the Hertz farm for a lesson in cider pressing. Each child gets to throw an apple into the hopper and watch the juice flow out.
Juanita Swoope is seeing to it that her grandchild's third-grade class at Knotts Island Elementary School is getting the taste of cider early, too. The children all drank Swoope's cider at their class Thanksgiving feast. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by CHARLIE MEADS
Mike Eaton puts a hard turn on the antique cider press that his
father rebuilt and restored.
Whole, unpeeled apples go in the press, but a strainer separates the
pulp from the cider.
Jim Hertz takes a sip of cider made from apples grown at his farm on
Muddy Creek Road. The secret to keeping hard cider tasting fresh,
Hertz says, is to store it at a cold 30-40 degrees.
Using a funnel, Toni Eaton pours strained cider into plastic gallon
milk jugs, some of which she'll freeze. ``You've got to have 10
hands,'' she says.
Using a funnel, Toni Eaton pours strained cider into plastic gallon
milk jugs, some of which she'll freeze. ``You've got to have 10
hands,'' she says.
ETMike Eaton cranks the apple chopper as his wife Toni feeds
homegrown fruit into the bin. The Eatons have 25 trees bearing a
variety of apples.
by CNB