Mint Vinegar
1 quart best cider vinegar 1 large handful mint leaves Heat one pint vinegar to the simmering point. Wash and chop the mint leaves. Add to the hot vinegar. Cover, and steep in a warm place for thirty minutes. Add the remaining vinegar. Strain and bottle. ba hoagoda bra gilding •
A simple infused vinegar that takes about forty minutes of mostly unattended time. The only thing to get right is the heat: vinegar should never actually boil during the infusion.
- Simmering point, not boilingBring the pint of vinegar just to the point where bubbles begin to rise, then take it off the heat before it rolls. Boiling drives off the aromatics you are trying to capture and sharpens the vinegar unpleasantly.
- Why only half the vinegar is heatedAdding the remaining pint at the end would drop the temperature and slow further extraction. The recipe gives no reason for the two-stage method, so this is inference rather than stated intent.
- Pans and vesselsUse stainless steel, enamel or glass. Aluminium, copper and untinned iron react with hot vinegar and will give the finished bottle a metallic taste and a dull colour.
- A large handful of mintRoughly 1 to 1 1/2 packed cups of leaves, or the yield of two good supermarket bunches, stripped from the stems. Spearmint is the traditional choice; peppermint is markedly more aggressive.
- StrainingA fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth or a coffee filter gives a clear vinegar. Stray leaf fragments left in the bottle will darken and settle as sediment.
- BottlesWash and rinse bottles in very hot water and dry them fully before filling. Vinegar at this acidity is self-preserving, but a wet or dirty bottle clouds the contents.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly 1 quart, less what the mint and the straining absorb. Stored capped in a cool dark cupboard it should hold its flavour for months, though any green tint fades toward olive fairly quickly.
- Using itIts older job is as the base of a mint sauce for lamb, thinned with a little sugar and water. In a vinaigrette use a lighter hand than usual; mint vinegar carries further than plain cider vinegar.
Herb vinegars were one way of keeping summer flavour into winter before home freezing, and many general cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry a short run of them together: tarragon, basil, celery seed, garlic, mint. Mint vinegar sits near two British habits that carried into American kitchens, the salad dressing and the mint sauce served with roast lamb, which is essentially chopped mint steeped in sweetened vinegar. Cider vinegar rather than wine vinegar was the common American household vinegar, pressed from apples and cheaply available. The instruction to specify "best" cider vinegar is worth noting, as adulterated and diluted vinegars were a recognised complaint in the period.