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Sugar Vinegar
Put eight pounds of the coarsest and cheapest moist sugar into five gallons of water. Stir the liquor well, boil it, skimming carefully till the scum ceases to rise. Pour it into a cask, and when it is lukewarm put into it a thick piece of toast well covered with fresh yeast. Leave it open for four or five days, then paste a piece of paper over the bung-hole, and prick it in three or four places with a pin. Keep it in a warm dry place till it is ready, then draw it off, and bottle it. Before bottling it, boil it a quarter of a minute, as this will keep it from becoming thick and cloudy. The vessels containing the vinegar should not be quite filled, nor should the vinegar be kept entirely from the air. If this vinegar is made in March or April, it will be ready for bottling in September.
This is a two-stage ferment written as one continuous process: yeast turns the sugar water into a weak alcohol wash, then airborne Acetobacter turns the alcohol into acetic acid. The whole point of the pinpricked paper and the half-filled bottles is air, and that is where the recipe most needs interpreting.
- Scale it downEight pounds of sugar to five gallons of water is roughly 160 g sugar per litre. A workable test batch is 160 g sugar to 1 litre water, which fits a 2-litre jar and keeps the loss small if the ferment stalls.
- Moist sugar"Moist" or "raw" sugar was unrefined and slightly damp, closest to today's soft light brown or an unrefined golden granulated. The molasses traces feed the yeast and give colour; plain white sugar ferments but yields a thinner, flatter vinegar.
- The toast and yeastA yeasted toast raft was a common way to float a live culture on the surface of a cool wort. Modern equivalent: cool to below 30C (blood-warm, not hot) and pitch a sachet of any dry wine or bread yeast. Much above 40C the yeast is stressed, and hotter still it dies.
- Air is the hingeAcetification is aerobic. The open cask, the pricked paper and the deliberately unfilled bottles are all doing the same job. Use a wide-mouthed vessel covered with cloth, never an airlock, and never fill a container to the neck or the process simply halts.
- Souring is left to chance hereThe recipe assumes the local air carries acetic bacteria, likelier in a household where beer and vinegar casks stood about. Add a few spoonfuls of unpasteurised, live cider vinegar or a piece of vinegar "mother" once the alcoholic ferment has finished, or the wash may go mouldy before it goes sour.
- March to SeptemberSix months is realistic for a cool cellar. In a warm room, 20-28C, expect the alcohol stage in one to two weeks and sourness in six to twelve. Taste from the second month; it is done when it stops getting sharper.
- The final boilA quarter of a minute is a pasteurising step, not a cooking one, meant to kill the mother so the bottled vinegar stays clear. Heating to 65-70C for a couple of minutes does the same thing without boiling off aroma. Skip it and the vinegar will keep working and throw a haze.
- Do not preserve with itHome vinegar of unknown strength should be treated as a table and dressing vinegar. Pickling and canning recipes assume a tested 5 per cent acidity; use commercial vinegar for anything intended to keep.
- VesselsGlass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic. Acetic acid attacks aluminium, copper and unlined iron, and a metal-lidded jar will corrode at the rim.
Sugar vinegar belongs to the household economics of a country with no vineyards. Where French kitchens soured surplus wine and Italian ones cooked must down, British households made vinegar from malt, from ale dregs, from windfall fruit, or -- as here -- from nothing more than cheap sugar and water. Vinegar was a raw material: a kitchen that pickled its own onions and dressed its own salads needed gallons of it a year. The technique is the old open-cask or Orléans method, in which the souring is done by bacteria settling out of the air onto a large exposed surface; that the mother of vinegar was a living culture was still being worked out over the course of the nineteenth century, which is why instructions of this period speak of vinegar being "ready" rather than of feeding anything. The toast spread with yeast is a much older trick.