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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Orleans
Other methods recommended for hastening the process of fermentation are the addition of a quart or more of molasses to each cask, 2 ounces of brown sugar to each gallon of cider, or brown paper dipped in New Orleans molasses. But the bread dough is perhaps to be preferred. The ordinary skunk-cabbage balls, which. occur plentifully in swamps and meadows in many localities, are also employed for this purpose. Or the mother of vinegar from an old cider barrel will greatly hasten the process.
Cheap Cider Vinegar. - Save the pomace from which cider is made, or buy pomace from the cider mill. Put it into tight casks or hogsheads with the head knocked out of one end and a spigot near the bottom, and cover with filtered rain water. Tack over the top two or three thicknesses of cheese cloth to keep out insects and dust. Draw off the liquor from the bottom as fast as it ferments, and use it to dilute pure cider. Thus nearly two barrels of vinegar can be made from one of cider.
To Make Cider Vinegar Quickly. -Fill a jar or jug with cider and add for each gallon of cider a pint of New Orleans molasses and a cupful of good yeast. Take out the cork of the jug or leave the cover of the jar tilted slightly to admit the air.
These are farmhouse methods for turning cider and cider waste into vinegar, written when every orchard household expected to make its own. Two elements put the page out of reach today: a toxic plant used as a starter, and vinegar of wholly unknown strength intended for preserving.
- Skunk cabbage is not a foodThe "balls" of Symplocarpus foetidus are loaded with calcium oxalate raphides, needle-shaped crystals that cause intense burning and swelling of the mouth and throat. Nothing in this process removes them, and no modern kitchen has a reason to introduce the plant to a fermenting vessel.
- The acidity is unmeasuredCommercial vinegar is generally sold at around 5 percent acetic acid, and that is the level modern pickling recipes assume. Cider fermented in an open cask, then diluted with pomace washings, could be considerably weaker, with no way to know. Vinegar below the assumed strength does not reliably prevent Clostridium botulinum.
- Dilution is the point of the pomace method"Nearly two barrels of vinegar from one of cider" is a frank description of stretching. The pomace liquor is a wash of spent apple pulp; the recipe exists to make a small quantity of real cider go further, not to make a better product.
- Open vessels and rain waterCheesecloth over a hogshead keeps out flies but not airborne yeasts and moulds, and the 'filtered rain water' called for is roof-collected. Acetic fermentation does need air, but it needs it in a controlled vessel.
- PomaceThe pressed apple solids left after the juice is drawn off at a cider mill. It was a cheap by-product, put to use as livestock feed as well as for vinegar; the recipe assumes it can be had from the mill for little.
- New Orleans molassesA cane molasses from Louisiana, lighter and less bitter than blackstrap. It appears here as fermentable sugar for the yeast rather than for flavour.
- Mother of vinegarThe gelatinous mat of Acetobacter and cellulose that forms on the surface of souring cider. Transferring one from an old barrel is a genuine inoculation technique and the soundest suggestion on the page, but it does not solve the strength problem.
- Casks and hogsheadsA hogshead is roughly 60 to 65 gallons in American cider use. Recipes written for that scale do not scale down predictably, since surface-to-volume ratio governs how fast acetification proceeds.
- If you want cider vinegarUse a current recipe with a measured starter culture and titration, or buy vinegar of stated strength for any pickling.
Vinegar was one of the few preservatives a nineteenth-century farm could make entirely from its own land, and in apple country it came from cider as a matter of course: press the fruit, drink or sell the sweet cider, let the rest go hard and then sour. Books of household economy like this one treat vinegar as a running domestic supply rather than a purchase, which is why the advice runs to hogsheads and spigots instead of jars. The various "hasteners" listed here — molasses, brown sugar, bread dough, brown paper — are attempts to speed the process along, some by supplying more sugar for the yeast, others by introducing the organisms themselves, folk practice arrived at long before Pasteur's work on acetic fermentation in the 1860s. The skunk-cabbage suggestion is a reminder of how much such advice circulated by repetition rather than testing; the plant is common in eastern American swamps, and its inclusion here is generally best read as received wisdom passed along uncritically.