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Salad Vinegar
Take three ounces each of shallots, sweet savory, chives, and tarragon. Bruise them in a mortar, put them into a large stone jar, and with them two table-spoonfuls of dried and powdered mint, and the same of balm. Pour over all a gallon of the best vinegar, cork the bottle securely, and put it in the sun. At the end of a fortnight strain the vinegar through a filtering-bag, put it into small bottles, cork these tightly and use the vinegar for salads, etc., instead of ordinary vinegar.
A cold herb infusion in vinegar — no cooking, only patience and a clean jar. The proportions are generous enough that scaling down is the first order of business.
- Scale it downA gallon in an English cookery book is an imperial gallon, about 4.5 litres, and 3 oz each of four herbs plus the dried mint and balm makes a great deal of salad vinegar. A quarter batch — a little over a litre of vinegar, about 20 g of each fresh herb, 1 1/2 tsp each dried mint and balm — is easier to use up while it is fresh.
- Sweet savory and balm"Sweet savory" is summer savory (Satureja hortensis), peppery and thyme-like; winter savory is coarser but will serve. "Balm" is lemon balm. Both are herb-garden plants rather than supermarket ones, so a garden centre or a farmers' market is the likely source.
- "The best vinegar"Probably a good strong malt or wine vinegar; modern vinegars sold at around 5 per cent acidity serve the purpose. White wine vinegar gives the cleanest result and lets the tarragon read clearly; cider vinegar works but muddies the colour.
- Bruising, not pulverisingThe mortar is there to split the cell walls so the oils leach out. Crush the shallots and herbs until they smell strongly and look bruised, no further — herbs pounded to paste make a cloudy vinegar that is tiresome to filter.
- No metal in contactVinegar will corrode a metal lid and pick up the taste. Use glass, glazed stoneware or plastic-lined closures, and note that the recipe says stone jar in one line and bottle in the next: infuse in the wide jar, bottle after straining.
- The sun, and whether you need itSunlight supplies gentle warmth to speed extraction, which mattered in an unheated larder. A warm windowsill for a fortnight does the same, and a shaded spot at room temperature works nearly as well over three weeks with less fading of the green herbs.
- FilteringA "filtering-bag" is a cone of closely woven flannel or muslin. Two layers of damp muslin in a sieve, or a paper coffee filter for a final polish, gives a bright vinegar. Do not squeeze the solids or the sediment goes through.
- KeepingStrained and bottled, the acidity keeps it well at room temperature; flavour is best within six months to a year. This recipe tells you to strain, and it is worth doing rather than leaving herbs in the bottle for looks — the mint in particular turns bitter and pieces above the vinegar line can go slimy.
- Yield and useThe quarter batch gives about a litre after straining. Use it one-for-one wherever a recipe wants wine vinegar in a dressing, and in place of plain vinegar in mayonnaise, sauce tartare or a deglaze for chicken.
Flavoured vinegars were a standing feature of the English store cupboard, and a household that bottled its own tarragon, elder-flower or chilli vinegar in summer was drawing on a preserving logic older than refrigeration: vinegar both captured the season's herbs and kept them. This blend leans on the same tarragon-chives-shallot combination that runs through French herb cookery, pushed into a bottle. Setting the jar in the sun was a common nineteenth-century way of coaxing along a cold infusion, sunlight being a free source of gentle warmth.