Glossary · Culture
Cider with food
Definition
The regional traditions of eating with cider — Asturian cider houses with salt cod and cabrales, Basque cider houses with beef chop, Normandy with tripe and cheese, the West Country with cheddar and pork.
- Subject
- Culture
In more detail
These pairings are older than any analytical account of them, and they follow the same logic wherever they arose: acid against fat, tannin against protein, and a drink strong enough in structure to sit beside a substantial dish. The regional coincidence of a cider and a cheese is usually agricultural — the same land supported both.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Cider
Sidra natural
Asturian and Basque cider fermented to complete dryness from pure juice, unfiltered, uncarbonated and bottled without added gas or sugar. It is poured from a height to raise a momentary foam.
Culture
Sagardotegi
A Basque cider house: a working cidery with a dining room, open from January to spring, where guests eat a set menu and drink from the *kupela*, the great vats, at the cry of *txotx*.
Culture
Espicha
An Asturian cider gathering held at a *llagar*, at which cider is drawn straight from the vat and eaten with standing food — traditionally the occasion at which the new season’s cider is judged.
Sensory
Balance
The relationship between a cider’s sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol and carbonation, judged by whether any one of them dominates unintentionally.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Denominación de Origen Protegida Sidra de Asturias
Consejo Regulador de la DOP Sidra de Asturias · designation authority · passage verified 2026-08-24
The regulating council for Asturian cider. Read on 2026-08-24, and it turned out to carry far more than a permitted-variety list: an agronomic and technological characterisation of each admitted variety, with total acidity, total polyphenols, vigour, flowering, ripening, cropping and susceptibility to fungal disease. The characterisation is credited to SERIDA’s fruit-research programme. Two things it settles are corrections to what CiderHQ previously held: Asturias sorts cider fruit into nine technological blocks rather than five, and it publishes acidity as sulphuric acid rather than malic. The figures are transcribed into `data/trials/serida-asturias.ts` and cite this source, because this is where they were read.
Euskal Sagardoa / Sidra Natural del País Vasco protected designation
Eusko Label / Basque Government · designation authority · registered as competent for this subject
CAMRA cider and perry standards
Campaign for Real Ale · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. Registered for the consumer-campaigning vocabulary — "real cider", "full juice" — which is advocacy language rather than legal definition, and is recorded as such wherever CiderHQ uses it.