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Cayenne Vinegar, or Essence of Cayenne
INGREDIENTS.- 0%. of cayenne pepper, pint of strong spirit, or 1 pint of vinegar. INGREDIENTS.—1/2 oz. of cayenne pepper, 1/2 pint of strong spirit, or 1 pint of vinegar.
Put the vinegar, or spirit, into a bottle, with the above proportion of cayenne, and let it steep for a month, when strain off and bottle for use. This is excellent seasonvery sparingly. ing for soups or sauces, but must be used blanched, this vegetable is generally eaten Celery. With a good heart, and nicely Let the roots be washed free from dirt, all raw, and is usually served with the cheese. the decayed and outside leaves being cut off, preserving as much of the stalk as possible, and all specks or blemishes being carefully removed. Should the celery be large, divide it lengthwise into quarters, and place it, root downwards, in a celery-glass, which should be rather more than half filled with water. The top leaves may be curled, by shredding them in narrow strips with the point of a clean skewer, at a distance of about 4 inches from the top. SEASONABLE from October to April.
Note. This vegetable is exceedingly useful for flavouring soups, sauces, &c. (the outside leaves alone serve for this purpose), and makes a very nice addition to winter salad.
A cold infusion rather than a cooked preparation: dried cayenne steeped in vinegar or spirit until the heat and colour have moved into the liquid. Two points of care, the strength of the mixture and the length of the steep.
- The proportions are unreliable as printedThe weight of cayenne has been lost from the ingredient line, and the spirit measure has lost its fraction. Comparable nineteenth-century essences run to roughly half an ounce of cayenne per pint of vinegar, but the figure here cannot be recovered with confidence, so treat any quantity you use as your own decision and taste before bottling.
- "Strong spirit"This points to a high-proof spirit; recipes of the period call for rectified spirit or brandy. Vodka at 40 per cent works, and since capsaicin dissolves more readily in alcohol than in vinegar a spirit version is likely to be the stronger of the two, so count it in drops.
- Which cayenneVictorian cayenne pepper was ground dried capsicum, and was likely more variable in heat than a modern jar of fine cayenne. The two cannot be compared with any precision, which is another reason to start below whatever quantity you settle on.
- Choice of vinegarUse a plain distilled or cider vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity. Malt vinegar will work but its own flavour competes; wine vinegars are fine and give a rounder result.
- The month-long steepA month at room temperature in a stoppered glass bottle is genuinely how this works — capsaicin is only slowly extracted cold. Shake it every few days. Two weeks gives a usable but paler essence.
- StrainingStrain through a coffee filter or muslin, not a mesh sieve; fine cayenne dust passes through metal and leaves the bottle cloudy with sediment that keeps getting hotter.
- Keeping and usingThe vinegar version keeps a year or more in a cool dark cupboard; the spirit version indefinitely. "Very sparingly" is not politeness — work in half a teaspoon at a time in a pot of soup and taste, since the heat continues to bloom for a minute or two in hot liquid.
- YieldYou get back very nearly what you put in, less what the sediment absorbs. A pint fills two small dressing bottles and will outlast most households' appetite for it.
Pepper essences of this kind gave the Victorian cook a way to put controllable heat into a soup or sauce at the last moment without adding raw spice grit or waiting for it to cook out. Cayenne, a ground dried capsicum, had long been available in Britain through the spice trade, and by Beeton's day it was a standard store-cupboard item, valued for made dishes and potted meats as much as for heat on its own account. Steeping it in vinegar or spirit gave a clear liquid that could be dropped into a finished sauce -- the same logic behind the other flavoured vinegars and ketchups in this part of the book, all of them ways of banking a strong flavour in liquid form for a kitchen with no refrigeration.