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Green Mint Vinegar
Take some young freshly-gathered mint, pick off the leaves, chop them slightly, and fill wide necked bottles with them. Pour over them some good French vinegar, and let them infuse for two months or more. Strain through muslin into small bottles, cork securely, and put aside for use.
A cold infusion with almost nothing to go wrong, provided the mint stays under the vinegar and the jars are clean. The one thing worth changing is the two-month wait.
- Which mintAlmost certainly spearmint, the mint of English mint sauce. Peppermint carries far more menthol and will read medicinal in a dressing.
- "Good French vinegar"White wine vinegar, around 6 to 7 per cent acidity. Cider vinegar works and is sweeter; malt vinegar will bury the mint. Avoid anything labelled below 5 per cent acidity, which is both weak flavour and weak preservation.
- Two months is longer than neededMint gives up its oils quickly. Two to three weeks in a cool dark cupboard gets you most of the flavour; beyond a month or so the bright green note flattens and the liquid turns brownish. Taste at two weeks and strain when it suits you.
- Wide-necked bottlesThe point of the wide neck is packing leaves in and getting them out again. A Kilner or Mason jar does the job better than any bottle; you only need the narrow bottles at the straining stage.
- Keep the leaves submergedAny mint standing proud of the vinegar will discolour and can go mouldy. Press the leaves down and top up with vinegar so everything is covered.
- Bruise, don't pulverise"Chop them slightly" is right — a rough chop or a firm press releases the oils. Blitzing gives a cloudy vinegar full of fine sediment that no muslin will catch.
- BottlingScald the small bottles and let them dry before filling, and use new corks or plastic-lined caps; vinegar corrodes bare metal lids. Strain through muslin twice if the first pass looks cloudy.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a jar packed with leaves will take rather less vinegar than its stated capacity, and most of that comes back at straining. Kept sealed and dark it should hold its flavour for many months, though the colour fades well before the taste does.
- Using itA spoonful in a vinaigrette for lamb or new potatoes, in place of the sugar-heavy bottled mint sauce, or splashed over cucumber and peas.
Herb vinegars belong to a long English tradition of catching a herb at its summer peak and holding it through the winter, and Victorian cookery books group the various kinds together as a matter of course. Mint in particular had a settled place in the English kitchen through mint sauce with lamb, so a mint vinegar was less an exotic condiment than a shortcut to a familiar flavour out of season. The instruction to use "good French vinegar" reflects a period assumption that wine vinegar was the superior article and English malt vinegar the workaday one, an idea repeated across nineteenth-century household manuals. A flavoured vinegar was treated as a store-cupboard ingredient — something you made in July and reached for in January.