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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Pour
The cider will commence to ferment at once and will be turned into vinegar in about a week. Pour off the clear into demijohns or bottles and cork tightly for use. Leave the lees or mother, and fill up the original receptacle with fresh cider to repeat the process.
To Preserve Vinegar.- To preserve vinegar after it has ripened to perfection, draw it off from the mother into a clean cask and drive in the bung to exclude the air.
Or clarify and bottle it in tightly stoppered bottles and store at a low temperature. If it again thickens and shows traces of mother, it must be once more drawn off into a clean vessel. after which the wine is gradually added at the rate of about a gallon at a time until the casks are filled.
After about two or three weeks the wine is turned to vinegar. One half is then drawn off and bottled or stored for use, and the cask is refilled as before. This process is sometimes continued for ten years, without the casks ever becoming more than half empty, but after that length of time it is necessary to remove the accumulated sediment.
White-Wine Vinegar. - Crush 2 pounds of clean juicy raisins. Add a gallon of filtered rain water, place in a 2-gallon jug uncorked, and let it stand in a warm place. In about a month it will be converted into pure white-wine vinegar.
Pour out the clear vinegar through a cheese-cloth strainer, leaving the raisins and sediment in the jug; add pound of raisins in another gallon of water, and repeat the process.
Grape Vinegar. The juice of the grapes must first be extracted in a wine press and allowed to ferment.
Wine when a year old usually furnishes the best vinegar, as with greater age the wine loses a part of its organic matter and becomes unsuitable for vinegar. To make vinegar from wine it is first poured into a cask containing wine lees. It is then placed in cloth sacks in an ironbound vat or cask and squeezed through the cloth by means of weights from above. It is then placed in upright casks having a bunghole at the top and allowed to sour, same as cider vinegar. If casks are exposed to the summer sun, the contents turn to vinegar in about two weeks. But in winter the process in a warm room requires a month or more. The temperature should be 75° to 86° F. The wine is next drawn off into barrels containing beech-wood chips, to clarify for about two weeks. It is then ready for use. The original cask, containing the residue of mother, is used without cleansing to ferment additional wine.
In making the best qualities of vinegar the wine is first clarified by running it into casks or vats containing beech shavings. The ripening casks are then filled about a quarter full of boiling vinegar, which is allowed to stand for three or four days, Corn Vinegar.-Boil in a gallon of rain water a pint of shelled Indian corn until the kernels burst. Pour the whole into a 2-gallon stone jug and add filtered rain water to supply that lost by evaporation, making a gallon all told. Dissolve pound of granulated sugar in pound of soft water by bringing it to a boil. Pour into the jug; shake well. Cover the mouth of the jug with two or three thicknesses of cheese cloth. Let stand in a warm place at a temperature of 75° or 80° F. It will be converted into vinegar in about a month. Pour off this vinegar into another jug, leaving about half the mother, and repeat the process.
To preserve this vinegar, cover the mouth of the jug with a piece of cloth and store it in a dry, warm place. This recipe makes vinegar about as cheaply as it can be made, and gives a quality that is preferred by many to ordinary cider vinegar.
It is worth trying.
Several separate methods are run together here — the tail of a cider-vinegar entry, an Orleans-process wine vinegar, plus raisin, grape and corn versions — and the printing has dropped fractions from at least two quantities. The corn vinegar at the end is the most practical of them for a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: air plus a live motherAcetic fermentation is aerobic. The jug or cask must stay loosely covered with cloth so oxygen reaches the surface, and the gelatinous mother must be left behind each time you draw off. Cork it too early and you get alcohol, not vinegar.
- Missing fractions"Add pound of raisins" and "Dissolve pound of granulated sugar in pound of soft water" appear to have lost their fractions in the original setting; the intended amounts cannot be recovered with certainty. For the repeat batch the 2 lb given at the start is a reasonable working figure, and for the corn vinegar something on the order of half a pound of sugar dissolved in half a pound (about a cup) of water will serve.
- Filtered rain waterRain water was valued because it is soft. Bottled spring water, or tap water boiled and cooled, does the same job; heavily chlorinated water may slow the culture.
- Indian cornDried field or dent corn rather than sweet corn or popcorn. The kernels are boiled until they burst to release their substance into the water; the fermentable sugar in this recipe is the sugar added separately.
- TemperatureThe 75–86°F range given is correct and matters more than anything else about timing. Below about 65°F the process crawls; above 90°F the culture suffers. A month is realistic in a warm cupboard, longer in a cool house.
- You need a live cultureModern pasteurised supermarket vinegar contains no mother. Start with an unpasteurised raw cider vinegar with visible sediment, or a purchased vinegar mother, rather than trusting airborne bacteria as the original assumes.
- Beech chips and demijohnsBeech shavings served as inert surface area for clarifying and for the bacteria to colonise; untreated oak chips or nothing at all will do. A demijohn is a large narrow-necked jug, usually holding several gallons.
- Do not use it for canningHomemade vinegar is of unknown strength. Pickles and any water-bath preserving need vinegar of a known 5 percent acidity, so keep this for dressings, sauces and table use unless you titrate it.
- YieldThe corn method gives roughly a gallon at a time. The text directs pouring off the clear vinegar and leaving about half the mother in the jug, which is then refilled and the process repeated.
This entry sits in a chapter written for households that still bought cider by the barrel and regarded vinegar as something you kept going rather than something you bought. The wine-vinegar passage describes the Orleans process, the slow French method in which half-full casks are topped up and drawn off indefinitely, and the ten-year run before cleaning is the sort of longevity claimed for it. The raisin and corn versions are economy substitutes for households with neither wine nor a surplus of apples, and the book's closing note that corn vinegar is "about as cheaply as it can be made" is the real argument for it. Whole dried field corn was a staple of the farm pantry, and turning a pint of it into a gallon of vinegar was the kind of arithmetic these manuals existed to supply.