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Pepper Vinegar (Fill a quart bottle with small)
Fill a quart bottle with small peppers, either green or ripe; put in two tablespoonfuls sugar, and fill with good cider vinegar. Invaluable in seasoning sauces, and good to eat with fish or meat. If small peppers cannot be obtained, cut up large pods instead.--Mrs. S. T.
A one-bottle condiment that needs almost nothing translated, though a few details of vessel, vinegar strength and storage are worth pinning down.
- Vinegar strength is the hingeUse a cider vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity, which is the modern standard. The strength of what 1870s cooks called "good cider vinegar" is not recorded and varied. Homemade or unlabeled vinegars of unknown strength are not reliable for covering raw vegetables, since the acid is doing all the preserving work here.
- Quart bottleA quart is 32 fl oz, about 950 ml. A narrow neck suits pouring the vinegar off in a thin stream; a wide-mouth quart jar is easier to pack and refill but pours less precisely.
- Which peppers"Small peppers" meant the little hot pods grown in kitchen gardens, closest today to Tabasco, cayenne, bird or Thai chiles. Larger pods cut in rings work as the recipe says, but expose more flesh and soften faster.
- The sugarTwo tablespoons in a quart is a rounding of the vinegar's edge, not a sweetening. It dissolves faster if you warm the vinegar to a simmer, pour it hot over the peppers, then cap and cool.
- Blanch or prick the podsWhole peppers float and trap air inside. Prick each one once with a needle, or dunk them in the hot vinegar for a few seconds, so the liquid gets inside and the pods stay submerged.
- Keep everything under the liquidAny pepper standing above the vinegar can mold. Top the bottle up as you use it, and store it in the refrigerator rather than on a windowsill.
- Waiting timeThe original gives none. It is usable in a week and hits its stride at three to four weeks. It keeps for months refrigerated, and can be refilled with vinegar once or twice before the peppers give out.
- How it was usedSprinkled from the bottle over fried fish and boiled meats, and used as the acid in a pan sauce. The recipe's own "good to eat with fish or meat" leaves it open whether the pods themselves were eaten as well as the liquid.
Pepper vinegar is one of the oldest and simplest condiments of the American South, and the fact that *Housekeeping in Old Virginia* (1879) records it in a single sentence, contributed by a "Mrs. S. T.," shows how thoroughly it was taken for granted. Hot peppers were a common garden crop, and steeping the ripe pods in cider vinegar turned a crop that arrived all at once into a seasoning that lasted through the winter, when fresh acid and fresh heat were both hard to come by. The bottle traditionally sat on the table beside boiled greens and pot liquor, a pairing still standard in the region. Commercial pepper sauces in narrow-necked bottles were being sold by the mid-nineteenth century, and cutting up large pods when the small ones ran short is exactly the kind of practical substitution Marion Cabell Tyree's contributors specialized in.