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Gooseberry Vinegar
Let two quarts crushed gooseberries (not fully ripe) stand forty-eight hours in three quarts water, when press and strain. Allow a pint of sugar to each gallon and one tablespoon yeast for fermentation.
A cottage-scale fruit vinegar in four lines, with most of the process left to the reader's assumed knowledge. Everything that matters here happens after the last sentence.
- The hinge: two fermentations, not oneThe yeast converts sugar to alcohol; only then do acetic bacteria turn alcohol to vinegar, and they need air. Ferment covered with cloth in a wide-mouthed crock or glass jar rather than a sealed bottle, and expect two to six months at 70-80F before it smells and tastes sharply of vinegar rather than cider.
- Underripe fruit is deliberateGreen gooseberries carry more acid and less sugar, which suits a sour ferment. Fully ripe fruit gives a sweeter, flabbier result more like a fruit wine.
- A pint of sugarMeasured dry, roughly 2 cups, about 14 oz. That is added at a pint per gallon of pressed liquid, on top of whatever sugar the fruit itself contributes; the recipe says nothing about the strength of the finished vinegar.
- One tablespoon yeastIn a book of this kind that most likely means fresh compressed cake yeast or a spoonful of liquid barm rather than modern dried yeast. Roughly 1/2 teaspoon of active dry, or a packet of wine yeast, will do the same job for a gallon.
- VesselsNo iron, aluminium, copper or unglazed pottery at any stage. Acetic acid attacks all of them and the vinegar takes on metal. Glass, stoneware or food-grade plastic only, and a wooden or plastic spoon for the initial crushing.
- The forty-eight-hour steepThis is a cold maceration to draw juice and flavour, not a ferment. Keep it cool and stir once or twice; in a warm kitchen it will begin working on wild yeast and may go moldy on top, so skim anything that forms before pressing.
- YieldTwo quarts of fruit and three quarts of water press down to somewhere near a gallon of liquid, giving roughly three quarts of finished vinegar after racking off the sediment.
- Not for preservingThe acidity of a homemade fruit vinegar is unknown and usually well below the 5 percent required for safe pickling or canning. Use it for salads, sauces and drinks, and use commercial vinegar of stated strength for anything sealed in a jar.
Fruit vinegars were a standard piece of household economy in nineteenth-century Britain and America: the sour, thin-fleshed fruits that made poor eating still made serviceable vinegar, and the crushed pulp left from jelly-making was said to be steeped a second time for this purpose. Gooseberries were an obvious candidate, being both intensely acid when green and enormously popular in Britain, where competitive gooseberry clubs in the industrial north bred fruit for size through the 1800s. The vinegar sat alongside older sour condiments like verjuice, made from unripe grapes or crab apples, and served the same role of cheap kitchen acid. American cooks would later lose easy access to the fruit, as gooseberries and currants host white pine blister rust and were increasingly restricted from the 1910s onward in an effort to protect timber.