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Cayenne Vinegar or Essence
Put half a pint of brandy, wine, claret, or vinegar into a bottle with half an ounce of cayenne. Let it infuse for three weeks, then strain and bottle it for use. This essence is excellent for flavouring sauces, gravies, etc., but it should be used judiciously, as the strength of cayenne varies so much that it is impossible to say how much ought to be used. The best way is to put in two or three drops, then taste, and add more if required.
A cold infusion with three ingredients and no technique to speak of, so the only things worth pinning down are the quantities, the strainer and how hard the finished essence hits.
- Half a pintA British Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 284 ml (roughly 1 1/4 US cups). If you work from a US half-pint (8 fl oz) you will get an essence roughly a fifth stronger, which matters here.
- Half an ounce of cayenneAbout 14 g, which is a heaped 2 tablespoons of modern ground cayenne. Victorian cayenne was often adulterated or stale, so a fresh modern powder may well be hotter; if so, 1 tablespoon in the same volume of liquid should give a workable result.
- Which liquidCapsaicin is far more soluble in alcohol than in water or vinegar, so brandy or wine draws out more heat and colour in the same three weeks. A vinegar version will be milder and sharper, and suits salad dressings and oysters better than it suits gravy.
- During the three weeksKeep the bottle out of direct light and shake it every day or two. The powder settles hard at the bottom and the infusion is uneven without agitation.
- StrainingGround cayenne is fine enough to pass a sieve. Strain through several layers of muslin or a paper coffee filter, and expect it to run slowly; do not press the sediment through or the essence will be cloudy and gritty.
- The warning is the recipeTwo or three drops, taste, then add more, exactly as written. Judge each new batch this way rather than trusting the last one, since heat varies with the pepper and with how long it steeped.
- Yield and keepingYou will recover a little under the 10 fl oz you started with. The brandy version keeps very well in a stoppered bottle, and the vinegar version is stable too, though it dulls in colour after a year; a wine-based one, being far lower in alcohol, is less reliable.
Cayenne reached British kitchens as a colonial import and by the middle of the nineteenth century was the standard hot seasoning of the English store cupboard, sold ground and, notoriously, often bulked out with rice flour, salt or red lead — a scandal that ran through the food-adulteration reports of the 1850s. Cassell's, for its part, is insistent that the cook cannot know the strength of what is in the tin, attributing the variation to the pepper itself. Steeping a spice in spirit or vinegar to make a dropping essence was one Victorian answer to that difficulty: a liquid can be dosed drop by drop where a powder cannot, and it dissolves smoothly into a finished sauce instead of speckling it. The same book carries a family of these preparations — essence of anchovy, of shallot, of celery — all of them small bottles kept beside the store of made mustard and mushroom ketchup, the domestic equivalent of the flavourings a professional kitchen would keep to hand.