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Guava Vinegar
Save all parings and seeds from fresh or cooked guavas and place in stone jar, covering with cold water. Over the mouth of jar tie thin cotton cloth and let stand a week, when the old seeds must be removed and replaced with fresh seeds or else start new jars with fresh peel and seeds, pouring all the water together as the old seeds are removed. After the fruit is removed add one-half pint sugar to each gallon of fermented liquor. Keep the cloth tied over the jar-mouth for about two weeks (or less) after the sugar is added and fermented, then cork tight.
CHAPTER XXV
This is scrap vinegar: the peels and seed pulp left from making guava jelly or paste are fermented twice, first to alcohol by wild yeast, then to acetic acid by airborne Acetobacter. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a working ferment smells like, so the details below matter more than the timings.
- The hinge: air, not a sealAcetic fermentation is aerobic, which is why the cloth stays on. Corking tight is only for storage after all bubbling has stopped; sealing an active ferment builds pressure and can burst the jar.
- Vessel"Stone jar" means a glazed stoneware crock. A wide-mouth glass jar works and lets you watch the ferment. Avoid bare metal, which reacts with acid, and unglazed earthenware, which is porous and holds the ferment in the wall.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of sugar is one cup, about 7 oz, per US gallon of liquid. That is a small addition on top of whatever sugar the fruit itself gave up, and makes for a low-alcohol wash.
- The seed-replacing stepFresh parings and seeds keep feeding sugar and wild yeast to the liquor, as well as adding more of the fruit's flavour. Combining several jars' worth of water, as directed, builds up the extract before the sugar goes in.
- Temperature and timeBoth stages want 70-80F. "A week" and "about two weeks" are guides only; in a cool kitchen the process can run a month or more. Judge by taste and by the absence of bubbles, not the calendar.
- What to expect on topA gelatinous film is the mother of vinegar and is wanted. Fuzzy, coloured or dry mould is not; discard the batch rather than skimming it.
- Do not use it for preservingHomemade vinegar of unknown strength is fine for salads, sauces and drinking. It should not be used for pickling, canning or any recipe that relies on acidity for safety, since pickling recipes assume commercial vinegar of a known strength, usually 5 percent, and this is not.
- YieldExpect roughly a gallon of finished vinegar from a gallon of liquor, less what evaporates. Strain through cloth and store in corked or capped bottles away from light.
Fruit vinegars made from parings are often said to be the tail end of a thrifty sequence: the guava flesh went to jelly or cheese, the strained pulp to marmalade, and the peel and seeds u2014 which carry much of the pectin u2014 went into the vinegar crock. Guava recipes cluster in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, when Florida and the Gulf Coast were planting the fruit commercially and household writers had to explain what to do with a crop that bruises within days of picking. The method here is the same one used for cider and apple-paring vinegar across the nineteenth century, and it predates any understanding of what was doing the work: Pasteur's vinegar work of the 1860s established that a living organism caused souring, though the genus Acetobacter was not named until Beijerinck at the end of the century, and cooks long before that simply knew that sugared fruit water left under a cloth in a warm corner turned first to something like wine and then to vinegar.