In the original dust jacket. Yellow cloth binding with black title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Jack founded the Midsummer House, Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. 

This actual book was a favourite of Jack’s. As many from Cambridge know Jack reinvigorated the large apple orchards surrounding his home. Jack regarded cider as England’s natural wine. 

The book describes the rise and fall of cyder, and sets out in practical detail the traditional techniques for making it. We are all familiar with pasteurized, bland and carbon-dioxide-injected cider, but cyder is a living wine of some subtlety, matured in cask and bottle in the manner of champagne. Cyder disappeared from England in the nineteenth century, yet at its height in the seventeenth century cyder was often preferred to good French white wine and there was much discussion on how cyder should best be made. Today cyder is having a renaissance. The reader is taken through all the necessary stages from planting the tree, gathering the fruit, pressing and fermentation to laying down a vintage. The book also includes cyder food and drink recipes for when you have made your cyder.

Roger French studied zoology at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and took a D.Phil. in the history of science, working on medicine in the eighteenth century. He was a lecturer in the history of science at the Universities of Leicester and Aberdeen and lecturer and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. This book is the result of a combination of academic research and practical experience: Roger bought a cider-mill cottage in the 1960s where he made, and drank, a great deal of cider, recovering centuries-old techniques and preserving old varieties of cider fruit. He died in 2002.