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RHUBARB VINEGAR
For ten gallons, take twenty-five ordinary sized stalks of rhubarb, pound or crush with a piece of wood in the bottom of a strong tub, add ten gallons water; let stand twenty-four hours; strain off the crushed rhubarb, and add eighteen pounds of sugar free from molasses, and a teacup best brewer's yeast; raise the temperature to 65 or 68°, and put the compound into a twelve-gallon cask place it in a position where the temperature will not fall below 60°. In a month strain it off from the grounds, returning it to the cask again, and let it stand till it becomes vinegar.
A two-stage ferment written for a farmhouse cellar: yeast turns the sugar to alcohol, then airborne acetic bacteria turn the alcohol to vinegar. The original assumes a ten-gallon batch and a cellar that holds itself at 60F all winter, neither of which most kitchens have.
- The hinge: air, in the right orderThe first month wants to be closed off from air (a loose bung or airlock) so the yeast can work without souring prematurely; the second stage wants the opposite, a cloth-covered vessel with plenty of surface exposed so acetic bacteria can take over. The recipe never says this because a cellar cask did both by default. Left sealed throughout, you get rhubarb wine, not vinegar.
- Scale it downDivide by ten for a manageable one-gallon batch: 2 or 3 stalks of rhubarb, 1 gallon water, 1 lb 13 oz sugar, and about a tablespoon of yeast. The stated "twelve-gallon cask" for ten gallons of liquid is deliberate headspace for the foaming primary ferment; keep that sixth or so of empty space at any size.
- Twenty-five stalks is not a measurementNineteenth-century rhubarb stalks were what the garden gave. Reckon on roughly 5 to 6 lb of trimmed stalks for the full ten gallons, or about half a pound per gallon.
- Leaves off, alwaysRhubarb leaves carry oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. Trim to bare stalk before crushing. The book takes this for granted; do not.
- A teacup of yeastA period teacup is reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz depending on the source, and "best brewer's yeast" meant thick liquid barm skimmed from a brewery. A sachet of wine or ale yeast does the same job in a one-gallon batch; bread yeast works but leaves a coarser flavour.
- Temperature65 to 68F for pitching and no lower than 60F thereafter is sound advice and still is. Below 60F the yeast slows markedly; the acetic stage that follows is happiest around 70 to 80F.
- TimingA month to the first racking is a minimum, not a target, and "till it becomes vinegar" typically means two to four more months. It is ready when it smells sharp rather than winey and a gelatinous mother has formed on the surface.
- Do not use it for canning or picklingHomemade vinegar has no known acidity. Commercial vinegar is standardised at 5 percent for a reason, and anything preserved in an untested vinegar is not safely preserved. Use this as a table and cooking vinegar only, or have it titrated.
- VesselsGlass, food-grade plastic or a genuine wooden cask. No metal at any stage past the initial crush, and no galvanised tub for the twenty-four-hour steep.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book (Marysville, Ohio, 1876), a church-fundraiser compilation by Estelle Woods Wilcox, and its vinegar recipes belong to an economy where vinegar was a household product rather than a purchase. Cider vinegar was the default across the apple-growing states, but rhubarb ripened in April, needed no press, and grew in every dooryard, which made it a standing candidate for cheap acid; the same book runs sugar, honey and molasses vinegars alongside it on the same principle of ferment-then-sour. Rhubarb reached American gardens as a medicinal root before it was eaten, and only became common kitchen material in the nineteenth century, when cheap sugar made its sourness manageable, hence the folk name "pie plant" that period cookbooks use as often as the proper one. The instruction to keep the cask above 60 degrees is the tell that this was a cellar operation timed to run from spring into summer, with no thermometer beyond a hand on the staves.