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Whortleberry Vinegar
To each gallon of well-crushed fruit allow a pound of sugar and gallon and a half of water. Let ferment as for other fruit vinegars.
This is a formula rather than a method — the book assumes you have already read its other fruit vinegar entries and know what "let ferment" involves. Two separate fermentations are wanted: yeast turning sugar to alcohol, then acetic bacteria turning alcohol to acid.
- What a whortleberry isAn English name for the bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus, and in American books frequently applied to huckleberries and wild blueberries as well. Cultivated blueberries stand in perfectly well, though they are sweeter and less sharply flavoured than the wild fruit the author had in mind.
- A gallon of fruit by volumeThe original measures crushed fruit by volume, not by weight, and does not say whether a dry or liquid gallon is meant. A US gallon of crushed berries runs roughly 6 to 8 lb; if you are scaling down, work in volume as written rather than guessing at pounds.
- The sugar is lowOne pound of sugar across two and a half gallons of total liquid works out at only about 3 percent potential alcohol from the added sugar, a little more with the fruit's own sugars, which yields a thin vinegar. Roughly a pound of sugar per gallon of finished liquid is what is needed to reach 5 to 6 percent alcohol before the acetic stage begins.
- Air is the hingeAcetic bacteria need oxygen. Ferment in a wide crock or jar filled no more than three-quarters, covered with cloth against fruit flies but never sealed or airlocked once the alcoholic stage has finished. A sealed vessel gives you a weak fruit wine, not vinegar.
- Starter and temperatureAdd a few spoonfuls of raw, unpasteurized cider vinegar or a live mother to seed the acetic bacteria — older kitchens were likelier than modern ones to carry ambient acetic cultures. Hold the vessel at 70-80F; below about 60F the conversion stalls.
- TimingStrain off the fruit after the initial ferment slows, usually a week to ten days, then allow one to three months for souring. It is finished when it smells and tastes sharply of vinegar with no sweetness or alcohol left.
- VesselsGlass, glazed stoneware, or food-grade plastic only. Acetic acid attacks aluminium, copper and unlined iron and will pull metal into the vinegar.
- Do not use it for preservingHome-fermented fruit vinegar has unknown acidity, commonly 2 to 4 percent rather than the 5 percent that pickling and canning recipes assume. Treat it as a table and drinking vinegar; use commercial vinegar of stated strength for anything that has to keep.
- Keeping and yieldExpect a little over two gallons of finished vinegar from the quantities given. Bottled and left unpasteurized it will keep for years in a cool dark place, though it continues to change; heating to 150–160F and holding briefly will halt it.
Fruit vinegars belong to a older idea of the store cupboard, where vinegar was as much a flavouring and a medicine as a pickling agent. Diluted with cold water they were drunk as cordials and in the sick room, and "raspberry vinegar" appears in English and American household books throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a remedy for sore throats and feverish thirst. Whortleberry is the older British name for the bilberry, a low moorland shrub gathered wild rather than grown, and the word travelled to America where it attached itself loosely to huckleberries and blueberries his use use whortleberry, huckleberry and bilberry almost interchangeably. That the recipe gives no method at all, only proportions, tells you how routine the process was: the compiler expected any reader who had made raspberry or gooseberry vinegar to need nothing more than the ratio of fruit to sugar to water.