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Vinegar, Fruit
Take, pears, apples, or any other juicy fruit, crush them well with a stamper, and put them in a suitable tub. For every two bushels of fruit add four gallons of boiling water. Stir well, and set the preparation in a warm place for a week, skimming off impurities whenever fermentation arises. At the end of that time strain the vinegar through strong fine linen, pressing the pulp. Put the juice in a barrel, stir in a pint of yeast, and throw in a piece of bread. Let the cask be quite full; put the bung in loosely, and throw over it a piece of flannel. Set in a warm place for a month or six weeks, when the vinegar will be fit for bottling.
This is a two-stage ferment written for a farmhouse working through windfall fruit by the cartload. The proportions scale down cleanly, but a few of the assumptions behind them need stating.
- The hinge: air, not a sealThe loose bung and flannel cover are the whole point. Yeast turns sugar to alcohol without oxygen, but the Acetobacter that turns alcohol to acetic acid needs a steady supply of air while being kept free of flies. A tight seal gives you cider that never sours; a cloth tied over a wide-mouthed jar gives you vinegar.
- QuantitiesA bushel of apples is roughly 42-48 lb, so two bushels is around 90 lb of fruit to 4 gallons of water — roughly 1 quart of water per 5-6 lb of fruit. At household scale, 10 lb of crushed apples or pears to about 2 quarts of boiling water is close to that ratio.
- A stamperA wooden pounder or cider-mill pestle. A potato masher, a clean mallet, or a few pulses in a food processor does the same work; the fruit only needs to be broken open, not pureed.
- A pint of yeastThis means barm — the liquid, actively working yeast skimmed from brewing. Modern equivalents are a sachet of dried wine or cider yeast, or simply the wild yeast already on the fruit skins. Do not use a pint of anything sold as yeast today.
- Warm placeRead this as 70-80F for the alcoholic stage and 75-85F for the souring stage. Below about 60F the second fermentation stalls for months; a cool pantry is not warm enough.
- VesselsUse glass, food-grade plastic, or unglazed wood. Acetic acid attacks aluminium, cast iron and unlined copper, and will pull metal into the vinegar.
- Timing and finishA week of pulp fermentation and a month to six weeks in the barrel is optimistic for a small batch in a domestic kitchen; two to three months is more usual, and the vinegar is ready when it smells sharply of vinegar rather than cider and stops changing. A gelatinous mother forming on the surface is a good sign, not spoilage.
- Do not use it for preservingThe recipe gives no way of knowing the finished acidity, and homemade fruit vinegar commonly lands well below the 5 per cent acetic acid that pickling and canning recipes assume. Use it for dressings, sauces and drinking; use commercial vinegar of stated strength for anything sealed in a jar.
- YieldExpect roughly 2 to 3 quarts of vinegar from the 10 lb scaled-down batch above, depending on how hard the pulp is pressed and how much is lost to skimming.
Fruit vinegar was a byproduct of thrift rather than a delicacy: every orchard household had bruised windfalls and pressing waste that would not keep, and the two-stage ferment turned them into a preservative and a cheap souring agent for months of pickles, mint sauce and shrubs. Cassell's gives the entry as "Vinegar, Fruit", in keeping with an alphabetical dictionary arrangement, because vinegar-making was still understood as a piece of domestic chemistry a cook was expected to manage, not something bought by the bottle. The bread thrown into the cask is the older, pre-microbiological habit: the household cook working this way was not thinking in terms of Acetobacter — Pasteur had published on acetic fermentation by 1864, but the genus was not named until later — only that a crust and a little barm reliably started the change, and that covering the bung with flannel while leaving it loose was the difference between vinegar and a spoiled barrel.