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This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Aromatic
SPECIAL VINEGARS Aromatic Vinegar. This is a mixture or compound of strong acetic acid or ordinary vinegar with various essential oils. It is a volatile and powerful perfume having a pungent odor and is snuffed in the nostrils as a stimulant in languor, faintness, nervous debility, etc. To produce the best qualities of aromatic vinegar, a glacial or crystallizable acetic acid is combined with various essential oils at the rate of 6 drops, more or less, of the oils of clove, lavender, rosemary, calamus, etc., to 1 ounce of glacial acetic acid.
Aromatic vinegar must be kept tightly corked. For use it may be dropped on a sponge or snuffed from a vinaigrette. It may also be used as a caustic for warts, corns, and other callouses. But on account of its caustic properties it must be carefully kept from clothing and the skin. Treat accidental burns with cooking soda.
Imitation of Aromatic Vinegar.- Common vinegar may be boiled down with very gentle heat until 90 per cent to 95 per cent of its bulk has been lost by evaporation, and the remainder will be almost pure acetic acid. To this the essential oils may be added in the above proportions, and a fairly good grade of aromatic vinegar obtained.
Fruit Vinegars. - The juices of most ordinary fruits, as raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and the like, contain sufficient sugar to ferment and produce an alcoholic liquor from which vinegar can be made, either with or without the addition of sugar sirup or molasses.
To make vinegar from fruits, extract the juice by boiling the fruit with about its own quantity of water.
Squeeze out the juice through several thicknesses of cheese cloth. This may be done by inserting sticks at either end and twisting them. To each gallon of fruit juice add about a quarter pint of good yeast, and let stand in an open jug or jar with the cover VINEGAR, PICKLES, AND PICKLING slightly tilted at a temperature of 70° or 80° F.
Or the boiled fruit juice may be allowed to stand for two or three days, to ferment before straining.
And the yeast may be added after the fermented liquor has been freed from the fruit pulp.
Vinegar made from fruit juices is of better quality and keeps better than that made from malt liquors.
These juices are often prepared in much the same manner before they are fully turned into vinegar and used as cooling drinks. And ordinary vinegar is frequently flavored with fruit juices for table use. The following include miscellaneous recipes of these kinds: Raspberry Vinegar.-Pick over 1½ pints of fresh raspberries. Place them in an earthenware jar or jug, and pour over them 3 pints of pure vinegar. After twenty-four hours strain out the liquor, discard the fruit pulp, clean the jar, place in it 1½ pints of fresh raspberries, and pour the liquor over them. After another twenty-four hours repeat the process for the third time, thus using, all told, 41 pints of fresh raspberries. Decant the clear liquor through two or three thicknesses of cheese cloth, without squeezing, into a double boiler of graniteware, porcelain, or tin. But do not use a graniteware kettle that is chipped so as to expose the iron.
Stir in until dissolved 1 pound of crushed loaf sugar for each pint of liquor. Boil for one hour, taking off the scum with a skimmer as fast as it appears. Bottle, cork, and seal.
Gooseberry Vinegar.-Mash in a suitable vessel half a bushel of ripe gooseberries. Using for this purpose the end of a stick of hard wood.
Add 6 gallons of lukewarm rain water, and let stand twenty-four hours. Strain through several thicknesses of cheese cloth, stir in 12 pounds of coarse brown sugar, and pour the whole into a 9-gallon cask, filling it up with warm rain water. Let stand three or four days, stirring several times a day to dissolve the sugar, Head which settles at the bottom. up the cask, pack two or three thicknesses of cheese cloth over the bunghole, and place the cask in a warm place, near the kitchen stove indoors, but not in the sun. It will be turned into vinegar in from nine to twelve months. It may then be strained and bottled for use. When so made gooseberry vinegar is superior to the best white-wine vinegar, and will make a better quality of pickles than the most expensive vinegar of commerce, preserving the ingredients better, whereas the cost is next to nothing.
Or for each quart of ripe gooseberries, add 3 quarts of water, ferment forty-eight hours, strain, stir in 1½ pounds of sugar, and let stand in a warm place ten months or more, when it will be ready for use.
Two very different things sit under one heading here: a caustic perfume compounded from glacial acetic acid, and a set of genuine fruit-vinegar recipes. The first cannot be made or used as described; the notes below explain why, and flag what has changed in the fruit vinegars.
- Glacial acetic acid is not vinegarGlacial (crystallizable) acetic acid is roughly 99 per cent acid, about twenty times the strength of table vinegar. It causes deep chemical burns to skin and eyes on contact and its vapour damages the lining of the nose, throat and lungs. The direction to snuff it from a sponge or vinaigrette as a stimulant is the practice of an era that mistook a violent irritant for a tonic.
- The boiled-down "imitation" is equally wrongThe boiled-down "imitation" will not do what the text claims -- reducing vinegar by 90 to 95 per cent cannot yield "almost pure acetic acid." A good deal of the acid is carried off with the steam and the dissolved solids scorch, so what is left is a burnt, acidic residue, while the kitchen fills with acid vapour.
- Not a wart treatmentUsing concentrated acid as a caustic for warts, corns and callouses burns healthy tissue as readily as the lesion and carries a real risk of infection and scarring. "Treat accidental burns with cooking soda" is also poor first aid: neutralising a strong acid on skin generates heat and makes the injury worse.
- The essential oils, for contextOils of clove, lavender, rosemary and calamus are all still sold, though calamus (sweet flag) is restricted as a food flavouring in the United States because of the beta-asarone in some varieties. None of them make the acid carrier any safer.
- The fruit vinegars are a separate matterRaspberry and gooseberry vinegar are ordinary food preparations: sugared fruit juice fermented to alcohol, then oxidised to acetic acid by acetobacter. The 70 to 80 F fermenting temperature and the cloth over the bunghole are sound — the bacteria need air but not flies.
- Old measuresHalf a bushel of gooseberries is about 20 lb; a 9-gallon cask is a firkin. "Loaf sugar" is refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up, so ordinary granulated stands in for it. The raspberry recipe's "41 pints" is a printer's error for 4½ pints, being three additions of 1½ pints.
- Do not preserve with vinegar of unknown strengthThe book recommends its gooseberry vinegar for pickling, but home-fermented vinegar has no measured acidity. Safe pickling requires at least 5 per cent acetic acid, which only a titration or commercial vinegar can guarantee; a modern tested recipe should be used for anything that is to be kept.
- Chipped enamelThe warning against a chipped graniteware kettle is real and still worth heeding — acid fruit liquor attacks exposed iron and takes on a metallic, inky taste. Stainless steel or glass is the modern answer.
Aromatic vinegar belongs to the long tradition of medicated vinegars that runs from the plague-era "vinegar of the four thieves" through the silver and gilt vinaigrettes carried in nineteenth-century pockets — a small hinged box holding an acid-soaked sponge, sniffed against faintness in the way smelling salts were later used. That the same preparation was also recommended as a caustic for warts shows how thin the line was between cosmetic, perfume and medicine in a household manual of this period. The fruit vinegars sharing the page have a much longer domestic life: raspberry vinegar sweetened and boiled to a syrup is a drink often placed under the name shrub, though that name was also used for spirit-based cordials, diluted with cold water as a summer cooler and given to invalids well into the twentieth century, and the claim that a gardener's surplus gooseberries could yield a vinegar better than bought white wine vinegar "whereas the cost is next to nothing" is the authentic voice of a book written for people who counted such savings.