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QUICK VINEGAR
Fill a jug with cider, and turn into each gallon of cider a pint of molasses and a cupful of lively yeast. Have the jug full of the liquid, let it stand uncorked back of the cook-stove where it will keep warm. It will commence fermenting in twenty-four hours, and will not take over a week to make splendid sharp vinegar. It must be drawn off into another jug, leaving the dregs, and kept in a tight-corked jug or bottles, where it will not freeze.
This is a two-stage ferment compressed into one instruction: yeast turns sugar into alcohol, then wild Acetobacter from the air turns the alcohol into acetic acid. The recipe only really controls the first stage, so the results vary widely.
- The hinge: air, not warmthAcetic fermentation is aerobic, which is why the jug is left uncorked. A narrow jug neck gives very little surface area for the bacteria to work, so a wide-mouthed jar covered with cloth and a rubber band converts far faster and keeps flies out.
- Cider means the unfermented kindIn 1877 "cider" on a farm meant fresh-pressed apple juice, often already going hard. Use unpasteurized or at least preservative-free apple juice; anything containing potassium sorbate or sodium benzoate will not ferment at all.
- Lively yeastThis is the bakers' or brewers' barm the household kept going in a jar. A packet of dry bread yeast or wine yeast substitutes directly, about a teaspoon per gallon.
- The molasses is optional nowA pint of molasses per gallon adds fermentable sugar to boost alcohol, since farm cider was often weak. Modern apple juice carries roughly 10-12 percent sugar on its own, and the molasses will darken and flavour the finished vinegar noticeably.
- "Back of the cook-stove" is 75-85F"Back of the cook-stove" means warm, not hot -- That was the warm shelf behind the firebox; the book gives no figure, but somewhere in the region of 75-85F suits the bacteria. Cooler than about 65F and acetification slows markedly.
- A week is optimisticAlcoholic fermentation alone usually takes a week or two, and acetification another three to six weeks after that. Expect one to two months before it tastes genuinely sharp. It is ready when the smell is pungent rather than boozy.
- Racking off the dregsSiphon the clear liquid off the sediment as instructed and bottle it. If a rubbery translucent disc forms on top, that is the mother of vinegar, not spoilage; save it to start the next batch.
- Do not use it for canning or picklingHome vinegar of unknown strength cannot be relied on for the 5 percent acidity that preserving recipes assume. Keep it for salads, sauces and drinking, and buy commercial vinegar for anything shelf-stable.
Vinegar was a working necessity in a nineteenth-century household, wanted for pickles, catsups, salad dressings, cleaning and a fair number of home remedies, and the ordinary way to get it was slow: leave a barrel of cider in the cellar for a year and hope. Recipes like this one, and the several other vinegar formulas that sit near it in Buckeye Cookery, are shortcuts, pitched at the woman who has run out in July and cannot wait for the autumn pressing. The addition of yeast and molasses is the shortcut's whole logic, forcing a fast alcoholic ferment to feed the acetic bacteria that were assumed, correctly, to be everywhere in a warm kitchen. The role of those bacteria was only becoming understood at the time; Pasteur had published on acetic fermentation in the 1860s, but the farm practice of standing a jug behind the stove long predates any explanation of why it worked.