Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sugar Vinegar, Strong
Sugar Vinegar, Strong
Put a gallon of water into a stewpan with seven pounds of coarse moist sugar, stir it for a minute or two, then boil it for half an hour, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. Pour it out, and when it is new-milk-warm, or from 60 degree to 65 degree Fahrenheit, put into it a thick piece of toast well covered with fresh yeast. Let it stand for two days, and stir frequently. Put it into a cask, paste a piece of paper over the bung-hole, and put it in a warm dry place. Let the liquid stand till ready, then bottle for use. This strong vinegar will be found excellent for all purposes.
A two-stage ferment written as though it were one: yeast turns the sugar water into a crude wine, then airborne acetic acid bacteria turn that wine into vinegar. Everything that goes wrong with this recipe goes wrong because the second stage is never mentioned.
- The hinge: air, then patienceAlcoholic fermentation wants to be sealed off; acetification wants steady air. Pasting paper over the bung is the period's compromise — it keeps out flies and dust while letting air seep through. A modern equivalent is a wide-mouthed jar covered with muslin, never an airlock.
- QuantitiesAn imperial gallon is 160 fl oz, about 4.5 litres, and the recipe is British, so read it that way. Seven pounds of sugar to that volume is an extremely strong must — on the order of 40 per cent sugar by weight, well beyond what ordinary yeast will ferment out, so it will almost certainly stall sweet.
- Coarse moist sugarAn unrefined, damp brown sugar of the sort sold loose in the nineteenth century, still carrying molasses. Soft light brown sugar is the closest modern stand-in; the molasses it retains brings some minerals and trace nutrients the yeast can use.
- New-milk-warmThe recipe gives the number itself: 60-65F, about 16-18C. That is a cool pitching temperature by modern standards.
- The toast and yeastFresh yeast here would most likely be brewer's barm, though compressed fresh yeast was also sold by the later nineteenth century. The toast is a float and a carrier, nothing more. A sachet of dried wine or ale yeast rehydrated and stirred in does the same job without the bread.
- What the recipe leaves outYeast makes alcohol, not vinegar. Souring depends on Acetobacter arriving from the air, which in a Victorian scullery it reliably did. Modern kitchens are cleaner; a splash of unpasteurised live vinegar or a piece of mother will start the second stage far more dependably.
- "Till ready"Expect weeks for the alcoholic ferment and two to six months for acetification, longer in a cold room. It is ready when the smell is sharply acetic with no trace of sweetness or yeastiness.
- Strength, and one thing not to doThere is no way to know the finished acidity by taste. Without titration or test strips confirming at least 5 per cent acetic acid, do not use homemade vinegar for pickling, canning or any preserving that relies on acid for safety. Dressings and cooking are fine.
Sugar vinegar belongs to a family of household vinegars — sugar, raisin, gooseberry, whey, ale — made wherever there was no surplus of wine or cider to sour. Britain's vinegar was largely malt vinegar from the brewers, and a decent one cost money; a cook with a spare cask, cheap moist sugar and a warm corner could produce gallons for very little. The word itself is simply vin aigre, sour wine, and the process was understood empirically long before Pasteur's work in the 1860s identified the bacteria responsible; Cassell's, for its part, describes the yeast stage in detail and passes over the souring in silence. Pitching a ferment with a yeast-smeared piece of toast is an old brewing habit, and the coarse moist sugar and the paper-pasted bung-hole both place this firmly in the era of the domestic cask.