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Always Save
all the currants, skimmings, pieces, etc., left after making jelly, place in a stone jar, cover with soft water previously boiled to purify it, let stand several days; in the meantime, take your apple peelings, without the cores, and put on in porcelain kettle, cover with water, boil twenty minutes, drain into a large stone jar; drain currants also into this jar, add all the rinsings from your molasses jugs, all dribs of syrups, etc., and when jar is full, drain off all that is clear into vinegar keg (where, of course, you have some good cider vinegar to start with). If not sweet enough, add brown sugar or molasses, cover the bung-hole with a piece of coarse netting, and set in the sun or by the kitchen stove. In making vinegar always remember to give it plenty of air, and it is better to have the cask or barrel (which should be of oak) only half full, so that the air may pass over as large a surface as possible. Vinegar must also have plenty of material, such as sugar, molasses, etc., to work upon. Never use alum or cream of tartar, as some advise, and never let your vinegar freeze. Paint your barrel or cask if you would have it durable. Company, sickness, or other circumstances may prevent making
This is a vinegar-making procedure built entirely out of kitchen salvage: jelly skimmings, apple parings, and the last of the molasses. It works on the same principles a modern vinegar-maker uses, but the book leaves the critical variables unstated.
- The hinge: sugar is not enoughAcetic bacteria convert alcohol, not sugar. The sweet washings must first ferment to a weak alcoholic liquid before the acetobacter in the starter vinegar can turn that alcohol to acid. Left standing in an open crock as the book directs, wild yeasts will usually begin that stage on their own, but unpredictably; pitching yeast and letting it work a week or two makes it reliable. Sugar water poured straight onto vinegar with no alcohol stage tends to give a thin, cloudy, weakly sour liquid.
- Your starter must be live"Some good cider vinegar to start with" meant an unpasteurized barrel vinegar carrying a mother. Supermarket vinegar is filtered and pasteurized and will not seed anything. Use raw cider vinegar labeled "with the mother."
- VesselsA stone jar is a stoneware crock; any food-grade glass, stainless, or soundly glazed ceramic vessel does the same job. A "porcelain kettle" of this period means porcelain- or enamel-lined ironware, specified because bare iron and copper react badly with fruit acids. Avoid aluminum and bare cast iron throughout.
- Soft waterBoiling was for sanitation, not softness. Filtered or bottled water is fine; avoid heavily chlorinated tap water, which suppresses the culture.
- Air and headspaceThe half-full cask and the netting over the bung are correct and still standard: acetic fermentation is aerobic, so a wide liquid surface and free airflow speed it. Netting is there to keep out vinegar flies, which will otherwise colonize it. Cheesecloth or a coffee filter under a rubber band does the job.
- Temperature"In the sun or by the kitchen stove" means simply keep it warm; acetobacter work best somewhere in the region of 75-85F. Cold well below that slows or stalls the process, and freezing can damage or destroy the culture, which is presumably behind the warning. Direct summer sun in a glass vessel will overheat it.
- Alum and cream of tartarSome writers of the period advised these, as the book itself notes in rejecting them. Neither adds acetic acid: cream of tartar contributes tartaric sourness, alum astringency, and neither helps the ferment. The book is right to reject them.
- Timing and strengthExpect weeks to months, not days. The finished product is of unknown acidity: test it with pH strips or a titration kit if you intend to use it as a condiment, and do not use homemade vinegar of unmeasured strength for pickling or canning, which requires a verified 5 percent acetic acid.
- The cut-off sentenceThe final line breaks mid-thought; the entry continues beyond the text reproduced here, so the remainder of the advice is not shown.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) devotes a whole department to "Fragments," and this entry is that ethic at its purest: the currant pulp, the apple parings, the rinsings of the molasses jug, all funneled into a barrel that eventually produces something the household would otherwise buy. Vinegar was one of the great domestic necessities before cheap bottled distilled vinegar arrived, and pickling was one of the main ways a household held vegetables through an Ohio winter, alongside root-cellaring, drying and salting. The instructions to keep the cask oak, half full, netted, warm, and unfrozen are the accumulated practical knowledge of the mother of vinegar. Pasteur had established the microbial basis of acetic fermentation only some fifteen years earlier, and that understanding had not yet filtered into household manuals, which still treated vinegar-making as a knack rather than a biology. The closing advice to paint the barrel is about the wood, not the contents: an unpainted cask left in the sun dries, shrinks, and leaks.