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Clover Vinegar
Put a large bowl of molasses in a crock, and pour over it nine bowls of boiling rain-water; let stand until milk-warm, put in two quarts of clover blossoms, and two cups of baker's yeast; let this stand two weeks, and strain through a towel. Nothing will mold in it. -Mrs. McAlister, Goshen, Ind.
A molasses-and-clover vinegar of the sort kept going in a crock in the cellar. It is workable in principle, but almost every quantity in it is indefinite, and the finished product has no known strength.
- "A bowl" is not a measureThe recipe is a ratio: one part molasses to nine parts boiling water. A kitchen bowl of the 1870s might hold anywhere from a pint to two quarts, so scale to your crock and keep the 1:9 proportion. One quart molasses to nine quarts water comes to ten quarts, or about two and a half gallons, so size the vessel accordingly.
- Milk-warmRoughly blood heat, somewhere around 90-100F. The point is to let the liquid cool below the temperature that would kill the yeast before pitching it.
- Baker's yeast in 1877Measured by the cupful, this was most likely liquid yeast or barm rather than the dried granules sold today. A single packet of active dry yeast is the practical modern equivalent, and more will not help.
- Rain-waterRain-water was prized because it is soft and low in the dissolved minerals of well water. Do not substitute modern roof runoff, which picks up shingle grit, metals and bird droppings. Use filtered or dechlorinated tap water instead.
- The cloverClover blossoms, red or white, picked dry and open. Two quarts is a loosely packed measure of whole heads. Gather away from roadsides, lawns and any treated field, and pick over for insects rather than washing, which waterlogs them.
- Why it works, and the hingeThe yeast turns the molasses sugar to alcohol; airborne Acetobacter then oxidises the alcohol to acetic acid, and that second stage needs air. Cover the crock with cloth, not a lid, and leave it where it is warm and undisturbed. Two weeks gives an alcoholic, barely sour liquid; genuine vinegar usually wants several weeks to some months more.
- "Nothing will mold in it" is a claim, not a guaranteeA grey or white film on top is the vinegar mother or a harmless film yeast; fuzzy coloured growth is mould and the batch should be discarded. The boast only holds once the liquid is actually acid.
- Do not pickle with it blindSafe pickling needs vinegar of at least 5 percent acetic acid, and there is no way to know what this crock has produced without testing it. Use it as a table and dressing vinegar, and use commercial vinegar of stated strength for anything you intend to seal and store.
- YieldRoughly the volume you started with, less what the towel and the spent blossoms absorb. Bottle in glass and leave a little headspace.
Molasses vinegar was the cheap vinegar of nineteenth-century American households, made from the thin cane syrup that came by the barrel. Where orchards were plentiful people made cider vinegar; where sugar was the cheaper commodity, molasses and water did the same work. The clover blossoms are the local touch: they add a faint honeyed scent and, being covered in wild yeasts and acetic bacteria, they also help inoculate the batch, though the recipe does not say so. That Buckeye Cookery prints it at all, credited to a named contributor in Goshen, Indiana, is characteristic of the book, which was assembled from the household knowledge of Ohio and Indiana women and treats vinegar-making as an ordinary preliminary to putting up the summer's fruit.