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Mint Vinegar
Put into a wide-mouthed bottle enough fresh, clean peppermint, spearmint, or garden parsley leaves to fill it loosely; fill up with good vinegar, stop closely, leave on for two or three weeks, pour off into another bottle, and keep well corked for use. This is excellent for cold meats, soups and bread-dressings for roasts; when mints can not be obtained, celery seed is used in the same way.- Mrs. B. A. Fay.
A cold-infused herb vinegar that needs nothing but a jar and patience. The only real variable is the vinegar itself.
- Choose the vinegarThe recipe says only "good vinegar"; cider vinegar was widely available in American kitchens of the period, though the text does not specify. Use one at around 5 percent acidity; anything much weaker will be less reliable over two or three weeks at room temperature.
- Pack loosely, not tightlyThe instruction to fill the bottle loosely matters. Crammed leaves bruise and trap air pockets, and any leaf left standing above the vinegar line will darken and go slimy. Everything must be submerged.
- Dry the leaves"Fresh, clean" means washed and then dried well. Surface water dilutes the vinegar at the leaf surface, which is exactly where you do not want it weakened.
- Parsley is not a mintThe recipe treats peppermint, spearmint and garden parsley as interchangeable, and they are not. Peppermint is aggressive and medicinal, spearmint is the one wanted for lamb and cold meats, parsley gives a green, grassy vinegar closer to a dressing base.
- Infusion timeTwo to three weeks in a cool, dark cupboard is generous for mint; a week already gives plenty of flavor. Warm light-filled windowsills fade the color and can push the leaves toward mushiness.
- Strain properly"Pour off into another bottle" is the step people skip. Strain through a fine sieve or coffee filter so no leaf fragments carry over, then cork or cap tightly. Filtered and sealed, it keeps in the pantry for a year or more; flavor dulls before it spoils.
- Bread-dressings for roastsThis means bread stuffing. A tablespoon or two of mint vinegar in the stuffing for lamb or mutton does the work a modern cook would give to chopped fresh mint and lemon.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A pint jar of loosely packed leaves topped with vinegar will pour off somewhat less than a pint of finished vinegar, used a spoonful at a time.
Herb vinegars were the backbone of the nineteenth-century flavoring shelf: before reliable year-round produce and commercial extracts, steeping leaves in vinegar was how a household carried the taste of summer mint or tarragon into January. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by the women of the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio, and first published in 1877, is one of the books in which the whole vinegar-and-preserving department sat together. The pairing of mint with roast lamb and mutton is long-established English practice, and mint vinegar was the shortcut version of mint sauce, kept corked and ready. The closing note that celery seed can substitute "when mints can not be obtained" is characteristic of these community cookbooks, which assumed a kitchen garden but planned for the months it gave nothing.