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Pepper Vinegar
Take fifty fresh red English chillies, cut them in two, put them into a wide-necked bottle, and pour over them a pint of best vinegar. Let them remain for a fortnight, and shake the bottle occasionally. Strain, and bottle for use. Fresh vinegar may be put over the chillies three or four times, until their strength is exhausted. This vinegar is an agreeable addition to melted butter in making fish sauces, and is very useful for flavouring purposes. If genuine cayenne can be obtained, a quarter of an ounce put into a pint of vinegar will answer the same purpose. English chillies are at their best during September and October. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per hundred chillies. Sufficient for a pint of vinegar.
A straightforward cold infusion that needs no cooking, but a few of the terms and quantities want translating.
- The pintCassell's is British, so the pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml) rather than the US 16. Fifty split chillies plus that much vinegar need a wide-mouthed jar or bottle of a litre or more.
- "English chillies"Probably slender red cayenne-type pods, home-grown under glass or in a warm garden, ripening in September and October as the recipe says. Fresh red cayenne or red serrano are the closest supermarket equivalents; a jalapeño is far milder and will give a weak vinegar.
- The cayenne alternativeA quarter ounce is about 7 g, a generous tablespoon of ground cayenne to the pint. Dried powder makes a cloudier vinegar that wants a longer settle and a fine straining.
- The hinge: keep everything under the vinegarAny pod or fragment sitting above the surface can spoil and mould. Push the chillies down, top up so they are fully covered, and use the occasional shaking as the recipe directs to keep them wet.
- Straining and bottlingStrain through muslin or a coffee filter rather than a sieve; seed fragments carry through and settle as sediment. Bottle in clean, dry glass with a non-metal or plastic-lined cap, since vinegar corrodes bare metal lids.
- Refilling the podsThe second and third fillings are noticeably weaker, which is what "until their strength is exhausted" means. Judge by taste, not by count, and discard the pods once the vinegar comes out merely sour.
- "Melted butter"In this book melted butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply clarified butter. The vinegar is stirred in at the end, off the heat, a teaspoon at a time.
- Yield and keepingOne pint of finished vinegar, used by the spoonful. Kept dark and capped, it holds its flavour for a year or more; the acidity does the preserving, so no processing is needed.
Chilli or pepper vinegar was a fixture of the Victorian cruet stand, one of a family of flavoured vinegars — tarragon, garlic, shallot, cucumber — that gave a cook sharpness and heat without recourse to imported bottled sauces. The recipe offers cayenne as a substitute for fresh pods, and the telling word is "genuine": ground cayenne had a bad nineteenth-century reputation, having been repeatedly found adulterated with brick dust, turmeric and, most notoriously, red lead and vermilion to brighten its colour, a scandal publicised by Frederick Accum's writing on food adulteration in the 1820s and still echoing in cookery books decades later. That reputation may well lie behind the qualification. Home-grown chillies steeped in vinegar sidestepped the problem entirely, and the note that English chillies peak in September and October reflects a kitchen still working from a glasshouse and garden calendar rather than a grocer's shelf.