Celery Vinegar
INGREDIENTS.- 1/4 1/4 oz. of celery seed, 1 pint of vinegar.
Crush the seed by pounding it in a mortar; boil the vinegar, and when cold, pour it to the seed; let it infuse for a fortnight, when strain and bottle off for use. This is frequently used in salads.
A cold-infused flavoured vinegar that needs nothing but a jar and two weeks of patience. The only real decisions are the vinegar you start with and how well you crush the seed.
- Quantities in modern terms1/4 oz of celery seed is about 7 g, roughly a tablespoon; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups. Scaling up or down works proportionally, but keep the seed fine or the flavour stays locked in.
- Which vinegarThe recipe just says vinegar; malt vinegar, dark and assertive, was the everyday English vinegar of the period. Cider vinegar or a plain white wine vinegar gives a cleaner result for salads; avoid balsamic, which will bury the celery entirely.
- Why boil it, then cool itThe book gives no reason for boiling and then waiting. Pouring the vinegar over the seed only once cold at least avoids driving off the seed's volatile aromatics. Let it come to room temperature first, as written.
- Crushing the seedThis is the step that decides the outcome. A mortar, or a few pulses in a spice grinder, cracks the hulls; whole seed left intact will give you a weak vinegar even after a fortnight.
- Vessel and storageInfuse in glass with a non-metallic lid, since vinegar corrodes bare metal. Keep it out of direct light and shake it every few days.
- StrainingStrain through a coffee filter or double muslin rather than a sieve, so the fine ground seed does not cloud the finished bottle. Strained and capped, it keeps a year or more at room temperature.
- Yield and useOne pint, which is a great deal of celery vinegar. Use it in vinaigrettes, in potato and egg salads, in coleslaw dressing, or a spoonful in a tomato juice or Bloody Mary in place of celery salt.
- Fresh celery insteadCelery leaves and stalk can be infused the same way, but a water-rich vegetable dilutes the vinegar and shortens its keeping. Seed is the more reliable route.
Flavoured vinegars were the Victorian kitchen's shelf-stable seasoning cupboard: tarragon, garlic, shallot, chilli, horseradish and celery vinegars all appear in nineteenth-century household manuals, and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management gathers a run of them together. Before commercial bottled dressings and before celery salt was a supermarket staple, an infused vinegar was the cheapest way to keep a flavour available out of season, and celery seed - which comes from smallage, the wild-type variety of the same species as the cultivated salad stalks - is intensely aromatic and stores for years. The instruction that this is "frequently used in salads" reflects a period when English salad dressing was often little more than oil, a seasoned vinegar and a spoonful of cream or mustard, so the vinegar itself carried most of the flavour.