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Tarragon Vinegar
1 quart best cider vinegar 1 small handful fresh tarragon Pick the tarragon leaves from the stems. Put them in a wire strainer. Set the strainer in boiling water for two minutes . Lift strainer, drain and chop beans, and add them to the vinegar. Let stand ten days or longer, shaking frequently. Strain and bottle for use.
A straightforward cold infusion that needs almost nothing but good vinegar, decent tarragon and patience. Two lines in the original will trip you up.
- "Chop beans" is a typoThe line should read "chop leaves." There are no beans in this recipe; the compositor or the scanner has garbled it. Chop the blanched tarragon and add that to the vinegar.
- A small handfulReckon on about 1 cup of loosely packed leaves, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 oz, for the quart. More is not better here: tarragon has a strong anise note that turns medicinal if the infusion is crowded.
- Use French tarragonFrench tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa) is what the recipe assumes. Russian tarragon, which is often what unlabelled or seed-grown garden-centre plants turn out to be, is coarse and nearly flavourless and will give you tinted vinegar and little else.
- Why blanch at allThe two minutes in boiling water sets the colour and knocks back the surface yeasts and moulds that ride in on garden herbs. Drain the leaves well and pat them dry; water carried into the bottle dilutes the vinegar and weakens its keeping power.
- Vinegar strength mattersUse a cider vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity, standard for commercial bottles. Homemade or "raw" vinegars of unknown strength are not reliable preservatives for a jar of wet leaves left at room temperature for ten days.
- The steeping jarGlass or glazed stoneware only, with a plastic or lined lid. Vinegar attacks bare metal, and a metal cap will corrode and taint the batch over ten days of frequent shaking.
- Keep the leaves underAny leaf sitting above the surface can mould. Weight or push the tarragon down, keep the jar in a cupboard rather than a sunny window, and shake as instructed.
- Strain properly, and yieldStrain through a coffee filter or double muslin so no leaf fragments remain in the finished bottle. You get a scant quart, enough for a year of vinaigrettes; a fresh sprig dropped in for looks will eventually soften and cloud the vinegar.
Tarragon vinegar was a common way of holding a summer herb through the winter before home freezing, and it earns its place in a salad chapter because tarragon is the classic vinaigrette herb of French cooking, as well as a mainstay of béarnaise, ravigote and sauce verte. The French estragon has been linked to the Latin dracunculus, "little dragon" -- the plant's botanical name -- and explained by the plant's coiling roots, though other authorities derive the word through Arabic and the "little dragon" reading is traditional rather than documented. French tarragon rarely sets viable seed and is propagated by division, so a cook was likely to have either a plant handed on from someone else's garden or none at all; bottling a quart of vinegar from a single summer's cutting made a scarce herb last.