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Chilli Vinegar
Cut 100 Small, fresh, red chillies into halves, and infuse them for a fortnight in a quart of best pickling vinegar. Strain the liquid and put it into small bottles. The flavour of the chillies will not be entirely extracted, so the bottle may be replenished with rather less vinegar than before. It is a convenience to have this vinegar at hand to flavour sauces, and to serve with fish, which many persons cannot eat without the addition of an acid and cayenne. Half an ounce of cayenne will answer the same purpose as the chillies, if it can be procured genuine. The vinegar will keep a long time if closely corked. Sufficient for one quart of vinegar. Probable cost of chillies, 2s. per hundred.
A cold infusion with almost nothing to go wrong, provided the vinegar is strong enough and the chillies are fully submerged.
- The quartCassell's is working in imperial measure, so a quart here is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres — a quarter more than a US quart of 32 fl oz. Scale the chillies accordingly if you are working with a 32 fl oz bottle.
- Pickling vinegar"Best pickling vinegar" meant a strong malt vinegar, usually in the region of 5 to 6 per cent acetic acid, as distinct from weaker table vinegar. Any vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity will work; anything weaker risks spoilage over a long infusion.
- A hundred small chilliesThe recipe calls for small fresh red chillies; 100 of them would come to a few ounces, though variety and size make any weight a guess. Modern chillies vary enormously in heat, so judge by weight and taste rather than count.
- Keep them under the surfaceThe hinge of the recipe. Halved chillies float, and anything sitting above the vinegar can mould. Weight them down or top the jar up so every piece stays covered for the full fortnight.
- A fortnightTwo weeks in a cool, dark cupboard is ample; shake the jar every few days. Longer infusion extracts more colour and capsaicin but also more vegetal bitterness.
- The second fillingThe advice to refill the drained chillies with "rather less vinegar" is sound — the second batch is weaker, so a smaller volume keeps it usable. Discard the chillies after that.
- Cayenne insteadHalf an ounce of cayenne to the quart gives heat without the fruit flavour, and will not clear: expect a cloudy, sediment-heavy vinegar that needs shaking or long settling. The caveat "if it can be procured genuine" is not decorative — see below.
- Bottling and keepingStrain through muslin into scalded bottles and cork or cap tightly. At full vinegar strength it keeps for a year or more; the colour fades first, well before the flavour.
Chilli vinegar was a fixture of the British store cupboard from the early nineteenth century onward, part of the same family of flavoured vinegars — tarragon, garlic, horseradish, cucumber — that a well-run household made in quantity and decanted into small bottles for the table. Its particular association with fish, noted here, reflects a long English habit of dressing plain boiled or fried fish with something sharp and something hot rather than a made sauce. The aside about cayenne being "procured genuine" is the most revealing line on the page: ground red pepper was among the most notoriously adulterated goods of the Victorian grocery trade, commonly bulked with ground rice or turmeric and, in the worst documented cases, brightened with red lead. Cassell's was published in the decades after the Adulteration of Food Acts of the 1860s and 1870s, and the caution reads as of its moment.