Verjuice
The sour juice of the crab-apple or of sour grapes; much more used in France than in England, where an acid-as lemon-juice, sorrel, or vinegar-is wanted in cookery. For some purposes, indeed, it is better than lemon-juice-as, for example, in taking off the flatness of apples or pears, and adding to the sharpness of pies. Prepare it as follows:-Choose ripe crab-apples and lay them in a heap to sweat. Pick away the stalks and any Vermicelli signs of rottenness. Then mash the fruit and express the juice. Strain it, leave it to ferment, and in a month it will be ready for bottling.
A short entry with a real method buried in it: sweat, mash, press, strain, ferment, bottle. A few points are worth making explicit before you start collecting crab-apples.
- The hinge: sweating the fruitLaying the crabs in a heap to sweat for a few days softens the flesh and makes pressing easier; hard, freshly picked crab-apples are difficult to press. Spread them one or two deep in a cool place and stop as soon as they give to thumb pressure, before any go brown and soft.
- "Ripe" crab-applesThe entry says no more than ripe, i.e. fully coloured fruit. Any true crab (Malus sylvestris or a garden crab such as John Downie) works; the point is acidity, not sweetness, so the sourest varieties are the best.
- Sour grapes, if you have themThe French verjus of the entry was more often grape than apple: unripe green grapes, pressed and strained, no fermentation at all. If you have access to green thinnings from a vine, that version is simpler and gives a cleaner, sharper acid.
- Expressing the juiceWithout a fruit press, mash the sweated fruit in batches in a food processor and wring the pulp through a jelly bag or muslin. Expect roughly 300-400 ml of juice per kilo of crab-apples, so a large basket makes surprisingly little.
- What "leave it to ferment" actually doesA month of wild fermentation drops most of the sugar and leaves a sharp, cloudy, faintly alcoholic liquid on its way toward cider vinegar. Ferment it in a loosely covered jar or under an airlock, never sealed, and rack the clear liquid off the sediment before bottling.
- Bottling safelyIf fermentation has not finished, sealed bottles will build pressure. Use clean bottles, leave the caps loose for the first week, or store in the refrigerator, which stalls the yeast.
- Keeping and using itKept cold, verjuice holds a few months before it turns fully to vinegar. Use it where the recipe wants tartness without the perfume of lemon: in apple or pear pies, in a pan sauce for pork or game, or in a mustard.
- A stray wordThe word "Vermicelli" in the middle of the sentence is stray matter from the neighbouring dictionary entry that has fallen into the text. Ignore it.
The name is simply the French verjus, "green juice": the pressed juice of unripe grapes or of hard sour apples, long a standard souring agent in European cooking. Medieval and Renaissance sauce-making leaned on it heavily, since lemons were an expensive import north of the Alps and wine vinegar was harsher and more assertive. Dijon mustard is often said to have been based on verjuice rather than vinegar, though this is tradition rather than documented fact. By the time this dictionary appeared in the 1870s, cheap Mediterranean lemons and industrial vinegar had largely displaced it in English kitchens, which is roughly the complaint the entry opens with: still common in France, little used in England. Its revival in recent decades, largely through Australian and Californian producers bottling grape verjus commercially, has made the ingredient easier to buy than to press.