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Strawberry Vinegar
To one gallon of strawberries take four pounds sugar. Mash together; add two gallons soft water and place in warm spot to ferment.
Three lines and no timings, no vessel and no finishing step — this is a memorandum rather than a method. It works, but only if you supply everything the original assumes its reader already knew.
- The hinge: air, then patienceThis is a two-stage ferment. Yeasts turn the sugar to alcohol in a covered vessel over a week or two, then Acetobacter needs steady air contact to turn that alcohol to acetic acid. Cover the crock with cloth tied down against fruit flies, never a sealed lid, or you will end up with strawberry wine and a bulging jar.
- QuantitiesA gallon of whole strawberries is roughly 5 lb; hulled and mashed it makes a few quarts of pulp. With 4 lb sugar in 2 gallons of water the finished liquid is thin and sweet by modern standards, and will ferment out to a moderately strong alcohol before it sours — expect a sharp vinegar rather than a delicate one.
- "Soft water"Rainwater or any low-mineral water, which nineteenth-century households distinguished sharply from hard well water. Use filtered or bottled water today; heavily chlorinated tap water may slow the ferment, though letting it stand uncovered overnight will drive off much of it.
- "A warm spot"Around 70-80F. Cooler and the ferment crawls; much hotter and you get off-flavours and a greater chance of mould on the cap of floating fruit.
- What the recipe leaves outStrain the pulp out after the first week or so of vigorous fermentation, or the berries will go slimy and taint the batch. Then let the strained liquid work on, stirring or racking occasionally, for anywhere from one to three months until it smells and tastes unmistakably of vinegar.
- Mother and surface growthA gelatinous disc forming on top is the mother of vinegar and is wanted. A dry, wrinkled white film is Kahm yeast, harmless but musty; fuzzy blue, green or black growth means the batch is spoiled and should be discarded.
- Don't preserve with itThe acidity of a homemade fruit vinegar is unknown and usually well under the 5 percent required for safe pickling or canning. Treat it as a drinking and dressing vinegar only, and use a commercial vinegar of stated strength for anything that goes into a jar.
- YieldSomething near two gallons, less what the pulp absorbs. Bottle it once it stops changing, and keep it cool and dark.
"Strawberry vinegar" covered two quite different things in nineteenth-century books, and this is one of them. One version was a shrub: ripe berries steeped in ready-made vinegar, strained, boiled with sugar and bottled as a syrup to be let down with cold water — a summer drink and a standby in the sickroom, where its sharpness was thought to answer a feverish thirst better than plain lemonade. The recipe here starts further back, fermenting the fruit and sugar into alcohol and letting that sour naturally into vinegar.