Home › Salads › Tarragon Vinegar
Tarragon Vinegar
Fill a fruit jar with fresh tarragon leaves or shoots, putting them in loosely; add the thin yellow paring of half a lemon with two or three cloves, and fill the jar with white wine or cider vinegar. Screw down the cover tightly, and allow the jar to stand in the sun two weeks; strain the vinegar through a cloth, pressing out the liquid from the leaves; then pass through filter paper, and bottle for future use. If a quantity be prepared, it were better to seal the bottles.
A straightforward cold infusion that still works exactly as written. The variables worth attending to are the vinegar's acidity, the lid, and the variety of tarragon.
- "Fruit jar"A screw-top canning jar — a quart Mason jar is the sensible reading, and takes roughly 3 cups of vinegar packed loosely with herb. The recipe gives no size, so scale the lemon peel and cloves to whatever jar you use.
- Use French tarragonArtemisia dracunculus var. sativa is the anise-scented one. Russian tarragon, which is what most seed packets grow, is coarse and nearly flavourless and will give you scented vinegar with none of the point of it.
- Dry the leaves firstRinse if needed, then spread the shoots out until completely dry. Water clinging to the leaves dilutes the vinegar and lowers its acidity, which is the only thing keeping the jar safe over two weeks at room temperature.
- Acidity mattersUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity. Some artisanal wine vinegars run lower, and a weak vinegar loaded with plant matter is a poor preservative.
- Not a metal lidVinegar attacks bare or uncoated metal, and long contact with an unlined lid can pit it and throw metallic flavour and specks into the infusion. Modern canning lids are lined, but a plastic-lined or all-plastic screw cap, or plastic wrap laid between jar and lid, removes the risk.
- The lemon paring"Thin yellow paring" means zest only — no white pith, which turns bitter over a fortnight's steeping. A vegetable peeler at a shallow angle is the right tool.
- Two weeks in the sunWarmth speeds extraction; the sun is doing nothing a warm windowsill or a spot near the stove will not. Shake the jar every few days, and taste at ten days — tarragon is assertive and the cloves creep up.
- Filtering"Filter paper" is a paper coffee filter or a lab-grade filter in a funnel. Strain through cloth first or the paper will clog; expect the pouring to take twenty minutes or more.
- Keeping itBottled and capped, it holds a year in a cool dark cupboard, though the aroma fades after a few months. The instruction to seal larger quantities most likely refers to sealing wax or a tight cork rather than heat processing — no canning is required for straight vinegar.
Tarragon vinegar was the standard bottled flavouring of the late nineteenth-century salad table, and the reason a book of this kind treats it as pantry stock rather than a novelty: it turns up in French dressings, in mayonnaise, in the mustard sauces served with cold meat, and it is the vinegar of sauce béarnaise. The herb itself is strongly associated with French cookery, and its name is generally traced through Old French targon and medieval Latin back to the Arabic tarkhun. Making one's own was a matter of both economy and trust — household manuals of the period spend a good deal of space on identifying fraudulent groceries. The fussy final steps here, filter paper and sealed bottles, reflect a moment when the domestic kitchen borrowed its standards of clarity and purity from the chemist's bench.