Home › The Principles of Cookery › NASTURTIUM VINEGAR (for flavouring Sauces, etc.)
NASTURTIUM VINEGAR (for flavouring Sauces, etc.)
Gather nasturtium flowers which are fully blown, put them into large glass bottles, and shake them well together. Fill the bottle with cold vinegar, and put a finely-minced shallot and the third of a clove of garlic with each quart. Let the vinegar remain for two months. At the end of that time strain it through a tamis, and add half an ounce of cayenne and half an ounce of salt. Put the vinegar into small bottles, and cork securely. Probable cost, 8d. per quart.
A cold-infused flavouring vinegar of the kind Victorian kitchens kept on the store shelf for salad dressings and sharp sauces. Nothing here is difficult, but the seasoning quantities and the vinegar itself need attention.
- Use a vinegar of known strengthThe preservation depends entirely on acidity, so use a commercial vinegar at 5 per cent acetic acid or above — cider or white wine vinegar suits the peppery flowers, malt vinegar is closer to what the book assumed. Do not dilute it, and do not use a homemade or "raw" vinegar of unknown strength, particularly since raw shallot and garlic are going into it.
- Which nasturtiumTropaeolum majus, the garden nasturtium or Indian cress, not the watercress that shares the botanical name Nasturtium. The flowers should be dry and freshly opened, picked from plants not treated with insecticide, and shaken out for insects before they go in the jar.
- Cayenne and salt: cut them right backHalf an ounce of cayenne is roughly two to three tablespoons to the quart, and half an ounce of salt a scant tablespoon. Victorian cayenne was often stale or bulked out with other powders, and may well have been weaker than modern ground chilli. Start with a teaspoon of cayenne per quart, taste after a day, and add more if you want it.
- TamisA tamis is a fine drum sieve of woven cloth. A double layer of muslin in a sieve does the same job; strain twice if the second bottling is to stay clear.
- Packing the bottles"Shake them well together" means settling the flowers so the jar is loosely full rather than bruising them. Keep every petal below the surface of the vinegar — anything floating dry will discolour and go slimy. A clean weight or a scrunched piece of parchment holds them under.
- Two months, out of the lightThe long steep is real, but daylight will bleach the colour and flatten the flavour. Keep the jar in a cupboard at room temperature and give it a shake every week or so.
- BottlingUse scalded, thoroughly dry bottles and plastic-lined caps or new corks; bare metal lids corrode over vinegar. Stored dark and cool the strained vinegar keeps a year or more, though the flavour is best in the first six months.
- Yield and useA quart jar packed with flowers will give somewhat less than a quart of finished vinegar, the flowers taking up room and soaking up some of the liquid. It is a seasoning, not a salad vinegar to use neat — a spoonful into a mayonnaise, a mustard sauce, a dressing for cold beef, or a fish sauce wanting heat and a mustardy edge.
Garden nasturtium came to Europe from South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was long called Indian cress for the hot, mustard-like bite of its leaves and flowers — a bite it owes to the same glucosinolate chemistry as watercress and horseradish. English kitchens made thorough use of it: the leaves in salads, the green seed pods pickled as a substitute for capers, and the flowers steeped in vinegar as here. Flavoured vinegars were a staple of the Victorian store cupboard, sitting alongside tarragon, chilli, elder-flower and garlic vinegars, and served the same purpose that bottled sauces and stock concentrates do now — a cheap way to put a defined flavour into a plain sauce at a moment's notice. The costing of 8d. per quart is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced almost everything so that a household could weigh the expense of making a thing against buying it ready-bottled from a grocer.