Fire Cider: Recipe, Dose, and the Trademark Fight
Fire cider is an acetum, a vinegar extract, of hot and pungent kitchen plants: Horseradish root, Armoracia rusticana; Garlic, Allium sativum; Onion, Allium cepa; Ginger, Zingiber officinale; and Cayenne, Capsicum annuum, macerated in raw apple cider vinegar for four to six weeks, strained, and sweetened with honey. It is hot and dry in every part, a stimulating diaphoretic, expectorant, decongestant, digestive, and circulatory stimulant, and it is taken at a tablespoon a day through the cold months and at a tablespoon every few hours at the onset of a cold. Rosemary Gladstar gave the preparation its name in the late 1970s, teaching at the California School of Herbal Studies, and it belongs to the folk tradition of vinegar tonics that runs back through the vinegar of the four thieves to the oxymels of Dioscorides.
The recipe
The proportions are a folk recipe, by volume, and every herbalist has their own.
- Grate half a cup of fresh horseradish root and half a cup of fresh ginger. Chop one onion and a whole head of garlic, peeled. Add a fresh chilli or a teaspoon of dried cayenne, and a tablespoon of grated fresh Turmeric, Curcuma longa, if wanted.
- Pack the plants into a litre jar to about two thirds and cover them with raw apple cider vinegar to the top. A piece of parchment between the vinegar and a metal lid stops the lid corroding.
- Macerate in a cool cupboard for four to six weeks, shaking daily.
- Strain, press the marc, and stir in honey to taste, usually a quarter of the volume. Bottle and label.
Other additions found in the tradition are lemon or orange with its peel, black pepper, thyme, rosemary, jalapeño, and a few slices of Astragalus root, Astragalus membranaceus, from Chinese medicine. Vinegar is a weak solvent, about 5 percent acetic acid, and extracts minerals, some alkaloids, and the pungent sulphur compounds well, resins and essential oils poorly; the strength of fire cider is the plants themselves, not the menstruum.
Dose and use
| Use | Dose |
|---|---|
| Winter tonic | 1 tablespoon, 15 ml, once or twice daily, neat or in warm water |
| Onset of a cold or blocked sinuses | 1 tablespoon every three or four hours, for one to three days |
| Digestion | 1 to 2 teaspoons before a heavy meal |
| As a condiment | on greens, in dressings, in broth |
Fire cider keeps a year or more in the refrigerator and many months in a cool cupboard, since vinegar and honey are both preservatives. A person with a hot constitution, with reflux, gastritis, or an ulcer, or with a dry irritated cough, is given a cooling or demulcent preparation instead; fire cider is for the cold, damp, congested person with a stuffed head and a sluggish gut. Garlic and ginger in these quantities, taken daily, add to anticoagulant and antiplatelet drugs, and horseradish and cayenne are not given to a person with a stomach ulcer. In pregnancy fire cider in a spoonful is a condiment and is not the concern the medicinal emmenagogues are.
Energetics and lineage
Every plant in the jar is hot in the second or third degree and dry, the classical antidote to the cold, moist condition of a winter chest and a stagnant digestion. Horseradish and garlic are stimulating expectorants that thin the mucus of the sinuses and lungs; ginger and cayenne warm the periphery and provoke a sweat; onion softens the whole with its sulphur and sugar. The oxymel, vinegar and honey together, is in Dioscorides; the vinegar of the four thieves, vinegar infused with garlic, rosemary, sage, and wormwood, is the plague preparation of the seventeenth century; and Samuel Thomson's cayenne is the heat of the American folk tradition. Gladstar's contribution was to name the combination and teach it to a generation.
The trademark
In 2012 a company in Massachusetts, Shire City Herbals, registered Fire Cider as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and began sending demands to small herbal businesses selling a product under the name. Herbalists organised in response, with Gladstar among them, arguing that the name was hers to give away and had been in common use in the herbal community for three decades; a petition, a boycott, and a Free Fire Cider campaign followed. The company sued three herbalists who kept selling under the name, and the case went to trial in the federal court in Massachusetts. In 2019 the court found that fire cider is a generic term for the preparation, and the registration was cancelled. The name belongs to the tradition again, and the episode is told in the schools as the reason folk names of remedies are kept open.
Not medical advice.