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Celery Vinegar
Pound a gill of celery-seed, put in a bottle and fill with strong vinegar. Shake it every day for two weeks, then strain it, and keep it for use. It will flavor very pleasantly with celery.--Mrs. Dr. J.
Celery Vinegar.
Take two gills celery-seed, pound and put it in a celery bottle, and fill it with sharp vinegar. Shake it every day for two weeks; then strain it, and keep it for use. It will impart an agreeable flavor to everything in which celery is used. Mint and thyme may be prepared in the same way, using vinegar or brandy. The herbs should not remain in the liquid more than twenty-four hours. They should be placed in a jar-a handful is enough, and the vinegar or brandy poured over them; take out the herbs next day, and put in fresh. Do this for three days; then strain, cork, and seal.--Mrs. R.
Two versions of the same preparation, differing only in strength. Both are simple infusions and translate directly to a modern kitchen; the only real variables are the amount of seed and the acidity of the vinegar.
- A gill is half a cupMrs. Dr. J. uses 1/2 cup of celery seed; Mrs. R. doubles it to 1 cup. Either fills a standard pint bottle handsomely, and the stronger version is closer to a concentrate to be used by the teaspoon.
- A celery bottleNineteenth-century celery glasses and vases were tall and narrow, made to hold cut stalks upright, and a 'celery bottle' here probably means a bottle of that tall, narrow shape. Any clean pint or quart bottle or jar with a tight closure does the same work.
- Strong or sharp vinegarThis means full-strength, undiluted vinegar, not the mild dressing vinegars sold today. Use one labelled 5 percent acidity, which keeps the infusion safely acidic and gives it keeping power; cider or white wine vinegar both suit celery seed.
- Pound the seedWhole celery seed infuses slowly; seed cracked in a mortar releases its oils much faster, which is presumably why both cooks call for pounding. A few seconds in a spice grinder works, but do not reduce it to powder or the strained vinegar is likely to stay cloudy.
- Shaking and strainingDaily agitation keeps the seed from packing at the bottom. Strain through a coffee filter or two layers of muslin; a single pass through a sieve leaves fine grit behind that goes on steeping in the bottle.
- The herb variationMrs. R.'s 'handful' of mint or thyme, changed daily, reads as fresh herbs rather than dried. The three successive twenty-four-hour changes build strength with short contact rather than a long steep.
- Brandy versionsHerbs steeped in brandy give a flavouring essence for sweets and drinks rather than a vinegar for the table. It keeps well; strain it as carefully as the vinegar.
- Yield and useDepends on the bottle you fill; a pint is a convenient batch. Use it where celery salt or celery seed would go: potato and chicken salad, oyster dressings, coleslaw, tomato juice, and as part of the vinegar in a mustard dressing. Store it corked in a cool dark cupboard.
Flavoured vinegars were the household answer to a problem of season and storage: celery was a labour-intensive winter luxury in Virginia, blanched and banked in trenches or cellared in sand, while celery seed kept dry on a shelf indefinitely. A bottle of celery vinegar let a cook put the flavour into a salad or a sauce in July. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (printings of 1878 and 1879 are both commonly cited), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials such as "Mrs. Dr. J." and "Mrs. R.", not all of them Virginian, is full of these keeping preparations, and the practice of infusing vinegar with seeds, herbs and aromatics reaches back well before it into English cookery, where tarragon, elder-flower and garlic vinegars were standard pantry stock. Commercial celery salt, which largely displaced this sort of bottling, was a later product of the same impulse to make celery flavour portable and shelf-stable.