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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Chop
Chili Vinegar. -Chop fine 25 chili peppers and pour over them pint or more of pure vinegar. Let stand about ten days or two weeks, strain through cheese cloth and preserve in small bottles tightly corked for table use.
Cayenne Vinegar. -Place ounce of Cayenne pepper or paprika in a glass bottle and pour over it a pint of pure vinegar. Let stand a month or more, shaking frequently. Strain into small bottles and cork tightly.
Shallot Vinegar.-Chop fine dozen shallots, put them in a glass bottle, pour over them a pint of pure vinegar. Cork tightly. Let stand a month or more, strain and preserve in small bottles tightly corked.
Three cold infusions that need no cooking at all — the only real skills are choosing sound vinegar and keeping the solids submerged. A few of the original quantities were mangled in printing and have to be read with judgment.
- The missing fractionsThe text reads "pint or more," "ounce," and "dozen" where the original almost certainly printed ½ or 1 followed by the unit; old fraction glyphs drop out easily. Treat these as roughly one pint of vinegar to 25 chilies, one ounce of ground cayenne per pint, and a dozen shallots per pint, and adjust to taste rather than assuming precision.
- Which vinegar"Pure vinegar" in this period meant vinegar not cut with water or doctored with acids — the era's adulteration worry. Use any 5 percent acidity vinegar, white or cider; below about 4 percent the infusion is not reliably self-preserving.
- Keep everything under the surfaceThis is the hinge. Chili or shallot pieces bobbing above the vinegar can grow mold and spoil the whole bottle. Fill so the solids are fully covered, and press them down or top up with more vinegar as they settle.
- Cayenne is not paprikaThe recipe offers them as alternatives, but paprika is usually a mild sweet pepper with little heat, while cayenne is 30,000–50,000 Scoville units. Choose by the result you want: paprika gives color and a faint fruitiness, cayenne gives a sharp burn.
- Chilies, fresh or driedTwenty-five chilies is a quantity, not a heat level — small hot bird chilies will produce something ferocious, and larger mild ones something merely warm. Fresh chilies release flavor faster; dried ones will want the longer end of the steeping time.
- Straining and clarityCheesecloth catches the pulp but the cayenne version will stay cloudy and throw a fine sediment. Let it settle a day and decant off the clear vinegar if you want it bright, or simply shake before use.
- Bottles and keepingUse scalded glass bottles with plastic-lined caps rather than bare metal, which acid corrodes. Kept cool and dark, these hold their flavor for six months to a year, though the chili vinegars fade in color sooner.
- Yield and useEach makes about a pint, which is a great deal of condiment vinegar — half quantities are practical. Chili and cayenne vinegars go on greens, oysters, and bean or grain dishes a few drops at a time; shallot vinegar is the base of a mignonette or a sharp vinaigrette.
Flavored vinegars were the cheap end of the Victorian and Edwardian condiment shelf: a housekeeper who could not run to bottled sauces could still put something sharp and aromatic on the table for the price of a pint of vinegar and a handful of peppers. Chili vinegar in particular had been in English cookbooks since the early nineteenth century, and it was often recommended as a table dressing for oysters, boiled fish, and cold meat. The insistence on "pure vinegar" is of its moment — Household Discoveries was published in the years around the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, when watered and artificially acidified vinegar was a live public complaint, and household manuals of the period devote whole passages to testing whether the vinegar you bought was what it claimed to be. Shallot vinegar belongs to the same family of French-influenced pantry staples that gave the English kitchen mignonette sauce, and it survives largely unchanged in oyster bars today.