Happy Halloween from Casper.
Two days ago, in my post about Halloween in Small-Town Wyoming, I said the move on trick-or-treat night is to leave a slow cooker of cider on low while you’re out. A few of you asked what actually goes in it. Fair question. If I’m going to hand out advice, I should hand out the recipe too.
Here’s how it goes at our house. Kimi gets our son into his costume, I find the flashlight that’s dead every single year, and before we walk out the door I dump a jug of cider and a handful of spices into the slow cooker. An hour or two later we come back with cold hands, a pillowcase of candy, and a kid running on pure sugar, and the whole house smells like cinnamon and oranges. Nobody had to watch a pot. Nothing burned. That’s my favorite kind of cooking.
A Very Old Idea in a Very Simple Mug
Warm apples and spices go back a lot further than the pumpkin spice aisle. The loose ancestor of mulled cider is wassail, an old English tradition. The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon phrase “waes hael,” meaning “good health,” and its roots go back as far as the 8th century.
The original wassail was a lot more than what’s in my slow cooker. It was a mulled drink, usually made with ale, curdled cream, roasted apples, eggs, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and sugar. It was served hot out of a big bowl, often silver or pewter, and people sang around it. I’m going to pass on the curdled cream.
There was also “apple wassailing,” an orchard tradition that’s still around in a few parts of England like Somerset and Sussex. People went out to the apple orchards, sang, made a lot of noise, and sometimes poured cider on the tree roots to “wake” the trees and scare off evil spirits so the next year’s crop would be good. The first record of it is from Fordwich, Kent, in 1585. Scaring off evil spirits with apples and loud noise sounds like Halloween to me.
The mug of mulled cider we drink today is a much simpler version of all that. The basic idea hasn’t changed for centuries, though: apples, spices, and something warm to hold on a cold night.
Wyoming’s Own Apple Story
I didn’t think of Wyoming as apple country when we moved here. It turns out I was wrong, and the story is a good one.
In 2017, Jackson-born Orion Bellorado and Ian McGregor founded Farmstead Cider in Jackson. It was Wyoming’s first commercial cidery in over 100 years. They got started by working with the Teton Conservation District to harvest apples from trees that were dropping fruit and drawing bears into Teton County neighborhoods. Along the way they found an entire forgotten urban orchard.
Their best-known release blends tart Teton County crab apples with apples from the Red Canyon Ranch orchard near Lander. A rancher named Ed Young planted that orchard back in 1880, specifically to supply cider to the mining towns around it. He planted roughly 2,000 trees, and only a few dozen are left. Those are old, tough trees that survived Prohibition in the 1920s, when cider orchards were destroyed on a massive scale. Plenty of people in Wyoming can relate to holding on through hard times.
Farmstead makes hard cider, the alcoholic kind, so it doesn’t go in today’s family pot. I still think it’s worth knowing that apples and Wyoming go back further than most people would guess. If you caught the last of the season at the farmers markets before they closed, you’ve seen that the fruit is out there.
Slow Cooker (or Stovetop) Mulled Apple Cider
Makes: 1 gallon, about 12 servings
This is the kid-friendly base recipe, which is what we serve on Halloween night. There’s a grown-up option in the notes below.
Ingredients
- 1 gallon apple cider (the cloudy, unfiltered kind, not clear apple juice)
- 3–4 cinnamon sticks
- 1 teaspoon whole cloves
- 1 teaspoon whole allspice berries
- 1 orange, sliced into rounds (or a couple of wide strips of orange peel)
- Optional: 3–4 thin slices of fresh ginger
- Optional: 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise
- Optional: a tablespoon or two of brown sugar or maple syrup, if your cider is on the tart side
Stovetop Instructions
- Pour the cider into a large pot and add the cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, orange slices, and any of the optional extras.
- Heat over medium-low until it’s steaming and just barely simmering at the edges.
- Turn the heat down to low and let it go for 20–30 minutes. Don’t boil it hard. A rolling boil cooks off the aroma, and the aroma is half the point.
- Taste it. If you want it sweeter, stir in a little brown sugar or maple syrup.
- Strain out the spices and orange, or just ladle carefully around them, and serve hot.
Slow Cooker Instructions (the Trick-or-Treat Method)
- Put everything in the slow cooker.
- Cover and cook on low for about 2 hours. You can go longer if you’re running late.
- Switch it to warm once it’s where you like it. It’ll hold at serving temperature for hours without anyone checking on it, which is why it works so well on Halloween.
The only gear I’d call out:
- 6-quart slow cooker: big enough for a full gallon, and it keeps the cider at serving temp for hours while you’re out walking the neighborhood. Crock-Pot 6-Quart Cook & Carry Programmable Slow Cooker
Notes and Variations
- Use whole spices, not ground. Whole spices are easy to strain out. Ground spices leave the cider gritty and cloudy in a bad way, and I learned that one the hard way. If you don’t want to fish cloves out of a mug, bundle the spices in cheesecloth or drop them in a big tea ball.
- Real cider matters. Clear, filtered apple juice will work if it’s all you have, but it tastes thinner. The cloudy stuff has more body and holds up to the spices better.
- Make it ahead. Leftovers keep fine in the fridge for a few days. Strain out the spices first, then reheat gently on the stove.
- For the grown-ups. Once the kids are in bed and the candy has been inspected (and taxed), pour a mug and add a splash of bourbon like Wyoming Whiskey from Kirby, or a splash of a Wyoming hard cider. Add it to individual mugs, never the whole pot. If you want a proper grown-up drink, my Wyoming Whiskey Hot Toddy covers that.
That’s the whole trick. It’s not fancy, and that’s why it works on a night when you’ve got a costume to zip up, a flashlight to find, and a five-year-old who’s been ready to go since breakfast.
If you make it tonight, let me know how it turned out in the comments, or tag me on Instagram or Facebook. I’d love to hear what you put in yours, and how the haul looked at your house. Stay warm out there, and watch for the little ones crossing the street in the dark.
— Sean