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Currant Vinegar
Pour juice from two gallons mashed currants in a barrel; wash remaining pulp in water; add to it two gallons molasses; strain when dissolved and pour also into the barrel with enough soft water to fill barrel two-thirds full. Dissolve meantime a cup of strong yeast in a gallon of water and add to the mixture. Place barrel in sun and while fermenting shake often. The autumn following add eight gallons water.
This is a barrel-scale household vinegar, made in two stages: a molasses-and-currant wash is fermented to alcohol by yeast, then left open to the air so that acetic bacteria turn the alcohol to vinegar. Almost nothing here translates directly to a modern kitchen except the principle.
- The hinge: air, then patienceThe yeast makes alcohol; only Acetobacter, which needs oxygen, makes vinegar. The shaking and the sun most likely serve to keep the liquid aerated and warm. Sealing the vessel tight once the alcohol has been made stops the acetification and leaves you with a sour currant wine instead.
- ScaleBarrel size varied: a US liquid barrel is 31.5 gallons, larger casks ran to 50 or more, so any total is approximate. On a 50-gallon barrel it would start around 33 gallons and finish near 42 once the gallon of yeast water and the later eight gallons are counted. To try it at a tenth scale, keep the original's equal volumes: the juice (and washings) from about 3 quarts of mashed currants, about 3 quarts of molasses, water to two-thirds of a 5-gallon fermenter, and a cup of active starter.
- Soft waterRainwater or any low-mineral water. Chlorinated tap water may slow both the yeast and the acetic bacteria; standing it overnight uncovered drives off free chlorine but not chloramine, so filtered water is the safer choice.
- "A cup of strong yeast"This means liquid barm skimmed from a working brew or a bread sponge, not a packet of dry yeast. A cup of active sourdough starter or a sachet of wine yeast rehydrated in the gallon of water does the same job.
- MolassesTwo gallons is roughly 24 lb, the fermentable sugar for the whole batch. Unsulphured cane molasses is closest to what was meant; blackstrap ferments but carries a heavy mineral flavour into the finished vinegar.
- Cover the vesselThe original assumes a bunghole and a barn. Anything open in a modern house needs a cloth or fine mesh tied over the top, or vinegar flies will find it within a day and lay in it.
- The timeline"The autumn following" means it stands until at least the next autumn; since the recipe never says when it is begun, the total could be a season or a good deal more than a year. The final eight gallons of water reads as a dilution of a vinegar grown too sharp to use neat rather than a second ferment, though the recipe does not say so.
- Test before you trust itHome vinegar varies widely in strength. Titrate or use test strips: it should sit below pH 4 and near 5 percent acetic acid before you treat it as vinegar. Do not use an untested homemade vinegar for pickling or any preserving recipe that depends on measured acidity.
Vinegar was a working household necessity long before it was a shelf item, needed for pickling, for salads, for cleaning and for the sickroom, and any farm with a fruit crop made its own from whatever was cheapest to ferment. Currants suited the job particularly well: the red and black bushes of Ribes cropped heavily in northern gardens, the fruit was too acid to eat out of hand in quantity, and the pulp left after the juice was pressed out still held enough sugar and flavour to be worth washing out, as this recipe does. The molasses is the real fuel here, currants alone being too lean in sugar to carry a barrel; that pairing of cheap imported sweetener with garden fruit is characteristic of nineteenth-century American household economy. Currant recipes of this kind grew scarcer in the United States after federal and state programmes began restricting Ribes planting in the early twentieth century, the bushes being an alternate host for white pine blister rust.