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Caper Vinegar
Turn a bottle of French capers and their vinegar into a quart of white wine vinegar in a jug. Strain before using. This is best for the Allemande dressing.
A steeped flavouring vinegar rather than a dish, and the vaguest part is the one thing you need to pin down: how much caper and how long to wait. The original assumes a familiar commercial bottle that no longer exists in a standard size.
- "A bottle of French capers"Bottle sizes of the period varied and are not recorded here. A modern 3.5 oz (100 g) jar of nonpareil capers, packing liquid and all, is a fair equivalent for a quart of vinegar. More capers give a sharper, more mustardy result; the ratio is forgiving.
- A quartFour cups, 950 ml. Use a plain white wine vinegar of about 6 or 7 percent acidity, not a sweetened or aged one, since the capers themselves supply the character.
- The jugAny glass or glazed vessel with a close cover. Avoid bare metal and reactive lids; vinegar will pit aluminium and corrode unlined steel caps over a long steep.
- Steeping time, which the recipe omitsTwo weeks at room temperature in a dark cupboard gets the flavour into the vinegar; a month is better. Shake or stir it every few days. There is no cooking step here, so time is doing all the work.
- Strain before usingMeant literally each time you draw some off, or once at the end into a clean bottle. The capers keep contributing flavour if left in, but they also cloud the vinegar and eventually go soft and shreddy.
- Allemande dressingThe name points to a dressing in the German manner rather than the flour-and-egg-yolk Allemande sauce of French cookery, though precisely what this book meant by it is not certain. Any vinaigrette or mayonnaise-based dressing that wants a briny lift will take this vinegar.
- KeepingStrained and bottled, it holds a year or more in a cool cupboard; the acidity does the preserving. Expect the aroma to fade before the sourness does.
- YieldSlightly over a quart once the caper vinegar is added. Enough to last a household a long season, and it makes a reasonable gift bottle.
Capers are the pickled flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a scrubby Mediterranean shrub, and in the nineteenth century they reached American kitchens largely as imports, sold in small bottles at prices that made the vinegar in the bottle worth saving. Recipes like this one belong to a whole family of thrift-and-flavour preparations found in professional manuals: tarragon vinegar, shallot vinegar, chili vinegar, each a way of holding a scarce imported flavour on the shelf in a form that could be measured out by the spoonful. The instruction to save the capers' vinegar rather than pour it away is the practical heart of the thing, and the note that it suits one particular dressing is the mark of a book written for cooks working a station, who wanted to know where a bottle would be used before they went to the trouble of filling it.