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Vinegars, Flavoured
Vinegar may be flavoured with herbs and spices, and a good store of these vinegars will prove of great service in cookery. All that is necessary is to procure the flavouring ingredients--such as celery or cress-seed, chillies or capsicums, tarragon-leaves, shallots, etc.--to put them in bottles, cover them with good cold boiled vinegar, and stopper them closely. In a week or two the vinegar will be sufficiently flavoured, and all that will be then necessary is to strain it off and bottle in small bottles for use. In nine cases out of ten the flavouring ingredients may have a second, and even a third, supply of vinegar poured upon them. Tarragon and chilli vinegars are particularly useful for salads; while a few drops of garlic or shallot vinegar added to a pint of gravy will impart a particularly fine flavour. Herbs also, if boiled for a short time in vinegar, will communicate their flavour to it, and the flavour of some fruits, when imparted to vinegar, is very delicious. The acid thus made, when mixed with water and slightly sweetened, constitutes a refreshing summer beverage.
A method rather than a fixed formula, and it still works exactly as described. The one thing worth adding is a note on acidity, since the safety of the whole business rests on it.
- Use vinegar of known strength"Good cold boiled vinegar" appears to mean vinegar brought to the boil and cooled before pouring over the flavourings; the recipe does not say why it was boiled, though clarifying and killing off any live mother are the likely reasons. In modern practice, start with a commercial vinegar at about 5 per cent acidity; wine and cider vinegars are the usual choices, and distilled malt or white vinegar suits chillies and shallots.
- Fresh herbs dilute the acidTarragon leaves and shallots are mostly water, and packing a bottle tight with them can drop the acidity of the finished vinegar below the level that keeps it stable. Keep the plant material to roughly a loose handful per pint, wilt or air-dry fresh herbs for a few hours first, and refrigerate anything infused with garlic or shallot.
- Cress-seed and capsicumsCress-seed here is most likely garden cress (Lepidium sativum), still sold for sprouting; celery seed is easier to find, though it gives a quite different flavour. "Capsicums" in a Victorian list of this kind generally means hot pod peppers rather than the sweet bell peppers the word now suggests, though the recipe lists chillies separately from capsicums.
- TimingThe recipe allows a week or two. Around two weeks at room temperature out of direct light suits tarragon, shallot and garlic; chillies may need longer to give up much heat, and fruit infusions are often ready sooner — taste rather than count days.
- The second and third fillThis works, but each successive fill is weaker and the spent herbs hold more water than the first time round. Two fills is the practical limit for soft herbs; whole chillies and celery seed will carry a third.
- Straining and storageStrain through a coffee filter or muslin so no fragment of leaf is left floating above the liquid, then bottle in small quantities. Well-strained herb vinegar keeps six months to a year in a cool dark cupboard; discard any that goes cloudy, ropy or develops a film that is not the harmless gelatinous mother.
- Boiling the herbs in vinegarThe alternative given at the end — a short boil — extracts faster but drives off the volatile aromatics that make tarragon worth infusing in the first place. Reserve it for tougher material such as horseradish, root ginger or celery seed.
- The summer drinkThat last sentence describes a shrub: roughly one part fruit vinegar to eight or ten parts cold water, sweetened to taste. Raspberry is the classic; a raspberry vinegar made this way needs sugar dissolved into it before it is palatable as a cordial.
Flavoured vinegars were a standing part of the English store cupboard long before bottled sauces became cheap, and Cassell's treats them as infrastructure rather than novelty — the point of keeping tarragon, chilli, shallot and celery vinegars on a shelf was to have concentrated flavour available in winter, when the herb bed was bare. Tarragon vinegar was often called for in dressings and in béarnaise, and its prominence in Victorian books reflects how hard fresh tarragon was to obtain out of season. The closing note about the sweetened summer beverage points to the shrub or drinking vinegar, a preparation with a long history in both English and colonial American households: raspberry vinegar was a standard sick-room and haymaking drink through the nineteenth century, and it was commonly said to keep without ice and to be cooling.