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Tarragon Vinegar, for Salads and Various Sauces
Gather the tarragon on a dry day, just before the plant begins to bloom. This will be late in July, or in the early part of August. Pick the leaves from the stalks, and with them fill wide-mouthed glass bottles up to the neck, and in doing so bruise the leaves slightly that their flavour may more easily escape. Cover with best white-wine vinegar, tie bladder over the mouths of the bottles, and then let the leaves infuse six weeks or two months. Pour off the liquid, strain through muslin till it is quite clear, put it into small bottles, and cork down securely. Store in a dry place. Time, about two months.
A straightforward cold infusion that needs only a translation of the vessels and a note on the vinegar itself.
- The bladderAn animal bladder tied on wet over the jar mouth dried to a tight seal. A plastic screw cap, or plastic wrap under a metal ring, does the same work. Avoid bare or reactive metal in prolonged contact with the vinegar, which can corrode and taint the flavour.
- Vinegar strength"best white-wine vinegar" meant a full-strength vinegar, not a weakened one, and modern commercial white wine vinegar at around 5 per cent acetic acid is what makes the infusion self-preserving. Use a standard commercial white wine vinegar and not a diluted or low-acid "salad vinegar", and do not cut it with water.
- Dry leaves matterThe instruction to gather on a dry day is the hinge. Surface water dilutes the vinegar in the jar and can leave leaves floating above the liquid; pat the tarragon thoroughly dry and keep everything submerged.
- Which tarragonFrench tarragon is the aromatic one and it rarely sets seed, so it is bought as a plant. Russian tarragon, easily raised from seed, is coarse and nearly flavourless and will give a thin vinegar.
- Bruise, do not crushA light press with the back of a spoon opens the leaf surface. Pounding to a pulp makes the vinegar cloudy and hard to strain clear later.
- Infusion timeSix weeks to two months gives a deep, resinous flavour, but two to three weeks at room temperature already yields a usable vinegar. Taste and strain when it suits you rather than waiting out the calendar.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given: the recipe fills the jar with leaves up to the neck, then vinegar to cover, which works out at roughly a large handful of tarragon per 500 ml. The straining loses a little, so expect slightly less finished vinegar than vinegar poured in.
- StorageStrained and corked, it keeps a year or more in a cool dark cupboard; light fades both colour and aroma. Some cooks slip a fresh sprig into the finished bottle for looks, which shortens its life and clouds it. The book, sensibly, does not.
Tarragon vinegar was a staple of the nineteenth-century English store cupboard because tarragon does not dry well: the flavour, which owes much to estragole, largely disappears in a drying shed but transfers readily into an acid. Bottling it in vinegar was the practical way to keep a July herb available in January, and the result underpinned a great deal of French-influenced cooking that Cassell's readers were being taught. It is the acid in a classic béarnaise and in sauce ravigote, and it stood in for fresh tarragon in salad dressings and cold sauces year-round. The plant's names point the same direction: estragon in French, from a chain often traced back through Arabic to Latin dracunculus, "little dragon", supposedly for the shape of its roots.