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Cider Vinegar
Pour half as much water on the pulp remaining after squeezing out the cider as there was of the juice. Let it ferment then press out the pulp and barrel the liquid. Or, as apples are used in the kitchen, boil the skins and cores in as little water as possible, sweeten with a little molasses, and let ferment.
Apples which are not keeping well may be boiled and the liquor strained off, a little molasses added, and let ferment. With crab-apples reduce the pressed juice onethird, then treat as above.
This is a set of four variations on the same idea: turn apple waste into a weak sweet liquid, ferment it to alcohol, then let it sour to vinegar. The original assumes you already know the second stage happens by itself, which in a nineteenth-century cellar it usually did.
- The hinge: air, not a sealed barrelAlcoholic fermentation wants to be shut away from air; acetic fermentation needs plenty of it. "Barrel the liquid" here is unlikely to mean a tightly stoppered cask; for souring, the vessel would have to be left open to the air -- bung out, or the opening covered with cloth. Modern practice is a wide glass jar or crock covered with cloth so the acetobacter can work the surface.
- Two fermentations, not oneThe recipe compresses weeks of work into one word. Yeast converts sugar to alcohol over roughly one to two weeks, then souring to vinegar takes anywhere from about one to three months, fastest in the 60-80F range. Well below that it slows badly; at sustained high temperatures the mother suffers.
- Pomace and its proportions"The pulp remaining after squeezing out the cider" is pomace. The only measurement given is water equal to half the volume of juice already pressed off, and the resulting liquid is thin -- this is deliberately a second-run, low-strength vinegar, not a strong one.
- Molasses stands in for sugarSkins, cores and windfall apples carry too little fermentable sugar to give useful acidity, hence the molasses. "A little" is unhelpfully vague; a modern cook will have to judge by taste, aiming at a liquid that is noticeably but not heavily sweet.
- You will want a starterNineteenth-century cellars were thick with wild yeast and acetobacter. A modern kitchen usually is not. Adding a few tablespoons of unpasteurised raw cider vinegar, or a mother, gets the souring stage going reliably and crowds out spoilage organisms.
- Crab-apples"Reduce the pressed juice one-third" means boil it down until two-thirds of the volume remains, concentrating the sugar. The recipe then says to treat it as above.
- Do not use it for canning or picklingHome-fermented vinegar has unknown acidity, often well under the 5 percent that tested preserving recipes assume. Use it for salads, cooking and drinking; buy commercial vinegar for anything that will be sealed in a jar.
- Signs it has gone wrongA translucent gelatinous disc on the surface is the mother and is wanted. Fuzzy coloured mould, or a smell of nail varnish or rot rather than sharp vinegar, means the batch should be discarded.
Vinegar-making from pomace was thrift rather than craft: the cider press left behind a heap of crushed skins, seeds and flesh still holding sugar, and "pressing the pomace twice" -- once for cider, once with added water for vinegar -- was one way of getting a second yield out of an apple crop. The second-run liquid, sometimes called ciderkin or water-cider, was weak stuff, often drunk as a light farm beverage and equally serviceable when left to sour. Vinegar, on this reckoning, was simply one of the ordinary yields of an apple crop, alongside cider, apple butter and dried rings. The kitchen variation here -- boiling skins and cores with molasses -- extends the same logic to a house with no press at all.