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Vinegar, Cider
Cider is the principal source of vinegar in the Northern States of North America. The common family method is as follows. The vinegar barrel in summer is placed in the garret, or on the sunny side of a building, and in winter in a room where it does not freeze. The refuse cider, already sour, or the daily remnants of the family table, are added to some good vinegar in the barrel, or to the mother of vinegar, as it is called. This mother of vinegar is a white or yellowish ropy coagulum of a mucilaginous appearance which is formed in the vinegar, and acts as a ferment upon cider not yet thoroughly acidified. The fermentation is often aided by putting into it a piece of dough or lean animal muscle, or by adding molasses, or the sugar which falls spontaneously from molasses. In a few weeks the vinegar will be formed.
This is a description of nineteenth-century American farm practice rather than a controlled method, and two of its instructions put it outside what can be recommended now. The vocabulary is worth unpacking even so.
- Why this one fails: the animal muscleDropping a piece of raw lean meat into a barrel of not-yet-acidified cider to speed the ferment adds nitrogen for the bacteria, but it also seeds a warm, low-acid liquid with everything the meat carries. Until the acetic acid concentration climbs, the barrel is a nutrient broth held at garret temperature for weeks, and nothing in the process brings it to a safe temperature at any point.
- Why this one fails: the table slops"The daily remnants of the family table" tipped into an open barrel is uncontrolled inoculation. Cider vinegar made from clean juice with a mother is generally self-protecting once it is sour, but the window before that is exactly when spoilage organisms and moulds take hold, and the recipe gives no way to tell which ferment won.
- No measured acidityThe original offers no target strength and no test. Vinegar used for pickling or any kind of preserving must be of known acidity, and household vinegar made this way can land anywhere. A current, tested recipe should be used if you want to make vinegar at home.
- Mother of vinegarThe "white or yellowish ropy coagulum" is a cellulose raft produced by acetic acid bacteria, known to the period as Mycoderma aceti and now grouped under Acetobacter. It is not a fungus and not the same thing as a kombucha culture, though it looks similar.
- GarretThe attic, chosen because it was the hottest room in the house in summer. Acetic fermentation runs best around 80-85F, which is why the barrel moved indoors in winter to keep it above freezing.
- "The sugar which falls spontaneously from molasses"Crystallised sugar settling out of stored molasses. Its role here is simply added fermentable sugar, the same as the molasses itself.
- Refuse ciderIn American usage of the period cider generally meant unpasteurised pressed apple juice, fermented or on its way there, not the sweet filtered product sold under that name in the United States today.
Cassell's, a British compilation, includes this entry as reportage on how another country supplied itself: in the apple-growing Northeast, cider was cheap and abundant enough that its spoilage could be treated as a resource rather than a loss. Farms that pressed apples commonly ended the year with barrels turning sour, and a household vinegar barrel was one way to absorb them, kept going by never emptying it fully and always leaving the mother behind, much as a sourdough is carried forward. The word "mother" for the gelatinous raft is old and widespread, with parallels in other European languages (Spanish madre de vinagre), and is usually explained as reflecting the pre-microbiological view that the substance itself generated new vinegar; Pasteur's work on acetic fermentation in the 1860s identified the bacteria responsible, but domestic manuals went on describing the mother in the older terms for decades. The practical value of a standing vinegar barrel was considerable, since vinegar served as a household preservative for pickles and ketchups and as a cheap cleaning acid.