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Chili Vinegar
This is made by simply infusing fifty small peppers in one pint of best white-wine vinegar.
A one-line formula that leaves out every variable that matters: which pepper, whole or split, and how long. Here is what the omissions mean in practice.
- "Fifty small peppers" is not a measurementThe recipe names no variety. It most likely means the small dried hot peppers of the period, of the cayenne or bird-pepper type, rather than anything large. Substituting fifty modern habaneros or fifty jalape tilde{}os would give wildly different results in both heat and water content.
- A pint is 16 fl ozA pint -- 16 fl oz if the book is American, 20 fl oz if it is English; check the source before assuming a 1:1 swap for a standard 16 oz bottle of vinegar. Use a wide-mouth jar for the infusion rather than trying to feed the peppers into a bottle neck.
- Infusion timeThe recipe gives none. Two weeks at room temperature out of direct sun gives a well-flavored vinegar; a month gives a fiercer one. Taste at intervals and strain when it suits you, since it will keep strengthening as long as the peppers sit in it.
- Whole or splitLeft whole, dried chilies release heat slowly and the vinegar stays clear. Split or bruised, they give up capsaicin and seeds faster and the result turns cloudy and much hotter. Whole is the safer choice for a first batch.
- Why white-wine vinegarPale in colour and comparatively mild, so the pepper shows; that is the likely reason for the specification, though the recipe does not say. Any vinegar at 5 percent acidity works, but cider or malt vinegar will dominate.
- Fresh peppers change the arithmeticFresh chilies carry a great deal of water, which dilutes the vinegar. If you use fresh, keep them fully submerged and refrigerate the jar, and strain within a couple of weeks rather than leaving them to sit indefinitely.
- Yield and useAbout a pint of finished vinegar, which lasts a year or more in a stoppered bottle in a cool cupboard. It is a seasoning, not a dressing on its own: a teaspoon or two in a vinaigrette, over greens and boiled vegetables, or in oysters and soups.
Chili vinegar belongs to a family of flavored vinegars y, garlic, elder-flower yn the dressings chapters of English and American cookbooks alike. Before bottled hot sauce was cheap and universal, an infused vinegar was the ordinary way to keep pepper heat in liquid form, and it is the same idea that underlies the vinegar-and-cayenne sauces of the American South. Boiled and plainly dressed vegetables were the rule, and a shelf of sharp infusions was one way a cook gave them variety without a new recipe. The peppers themselves came to Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and the small dried sort is often said to have been the common form, which would explain why the author could count them out by the fifty and expect to be understood.