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Vinegar, Cucumber
Take eighteen large cucumbers and six large onions; slice them thin, and put them into a pan with twelve shallots, one head of garlic, a table-spoonful of salt, the same of ground pepper, and a tea-spoonful of cayenne pepper. Add to these two quarts of good vinegar, and let it stand four days; then strain it through a flannel bag, and bottle it, with twenty peppercorns in each bottle.
A cold-infused seasoning vinegar of the sort Victorian kitchens kept beside the cruet stand, used for salads, cold meat and sauces rather than for pickling. Nothing is cooked, so the whole result depends on the strength of the vinegar you start with.
- Use a full-strength vinegar"Good vinegar" in a book of this date most likely means malt or cider vinegar, probably in the region of 5 per cent acetic acid, though the recipe does not say. Cucumbers are about 95 per cent water and will dilute the vinegar, so do not start with a mild or diluted salad vinegar, and do not add water at any stage.
- Scale it downEighteen cucumbers, six onions and two quarts of vinegar is a large quantity by modern standards. A sixth of everything — three cucumbers, one onion, two shallots, a couple of garlic cloves, a scant cup and a half of vinegar — gives a manageable amount.
- Salt and pepper by weightSalt and pepper -- A tablespoon of salt to two quarts is seasoning, not preservation; it draws liquid from the cucumbers as much as anything. The tablespoon of ground pepper and teaspoon of cayenne are assertive by modern standards.
- A head of garlicMost likely a whole bulb rather than a single clove, which is the usual sense in cookery books of this kind. Peel and bruise the cloves rather than slicing them thin, which makes the flannel straining easier.
- Flannel bagA double layer of muslin or a jelly bag does the same job. Let it drip rather than squeezing, or the vinegar will come through cloudy and throw a sediment in the bottle.
- The four daysSteeping should be done covered, at cool room temperature, and stirred once a day. Longer than about a week and the cucumber begins to go soft and vegetal rather than fresh.
- Keep it cold once bottledBecause the vegetables dilute the acid, the finished vinegar is less robust than the bottle it came from. Refrigerate it, use it within a couple of months, and discard it if it turns cloudy, ropy or gassy.
- Peppercorns in the bottleTwenty whole corns per bottle go in as a slow, continuing infusion; they are not strained out. The recipe does not say what size bottle it means, so scale the number to the bottles you use.
- How it was usedA spoonful in a salad dressing, over sliced cold beef or lamb, or stirred into a fish sauce. It is a condiment vinegar, not a brine — the strained cucumbers are discarded.
Flavoured vinegars were one of the standard economies of the Victorian storeroom: a bottle of tarragon, elder-flower, chilli or cucumber vinegar gave a cook a range of seasonings from one cheap base, at a time when bottled sauces were a relatively costly shop purchase. Cucumber vinegar in particular belongs to the late-summer glut, when a kitchen garden produced more cucumbers than could be eaten and the surplus went into pickles, cucumber ketchup and vinegars of this kind. It sits with the flavourings rather than the pickles because the strained liquid, not the vegetable, is the point.