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Compound Vinegar
1 pound of tarragon. 4 ounces of mustard seeds. 6 cloves of garlic. 6 small onions. 4 ounces of elder blossoms. 2 ounces of long pepper. 1/4 ounce of cloves. 4 quarts of white wine vinegar.
Put all together to steep in a two-gallon jug corked tight and let stand several weeks before using.
With such compounds as the above and others doubtless more fanciful than useful we may suppose d'Albignac of Limousin filled the vials which he sold by the case to the fashionable salad-crazed Londoners of sixty years since.
A steeped salad vinegar of the old aromatic school, meant to be strained and bottled rather than used from the jug. The proportions are large; scale down freely, since the balance matters more than the volume.
- Scale it downFour quarts of vinegar plus a pound of herb is a large batch by modern standards. A quarter batch — 1 quart vinegar, 4 oz tarragon, 1 oz mustard seed, 1 to 2 cloves garlic, 1 small onion, 1 oz elder blossom, 1/2 oz long pepper, a good pinch of cloves — fills two standard bottles.
- Elder blossom onlyUse the open white flowers of Sambucus nigra, stripped from the green stalks. Elder leaves, bark and green stems carry cyanogenic glycosides and should never go in. Dried blossom weighs far less than fresh; if using dried, an ounce is a generous handful.
- TarragonA pound means fresh French tarragon, stems and all — a very large quantity, well over a dozen supermarket bunches. Russian tarragon looks the same and tastes of almost nothing; check that the leaves are aniseed-scented before committing them.
- Long pepperPiper longum, the catkin-shaped spice widely used in medieval European cookery and later crowded out as black pepper became cheaper and more plentiful. It is sold by Indian and specialist spice merchants as pippali. Black peppercorns are a reasonable substitute at the same weight, though the sweeter, hotter note is lost.
- Vinegar strengthUse a white wine vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity. The acid is what keeps the raw garlic and onion in check over weeks at room temperature; a weak or diluted vinegar has no business here.
- The vesselGlass or glazed stoneware, never bare metal — the acid will pull metal into the vinegar. Cork tight, keep it out of sunlight, and shake it every few days.
- Straining and keepingAfter three to four weeks, strain through muslin, press the solids, and bottle the clear liquid. Discard the spent garlic and onion rather than leaving them in; strained and capped, the vinegar keeps a year in a cool cupboard.
- How to use itThis is a dressing vinegar, not a pickling one. A spoonful with three of oil makes a salad dressing in the manner intended; it also does good work in a mustard sauce or deglazing a pan of chicken.
The closing note points to a familiar story: the Chevalier d'Albignac, a French émigré in London, said to have made his fortune going from house to house dressing salads for the English, and eventually selling his seasonings ready-bottled by the case. The tale comes from Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût of 1825 and is anecdote rather than documented fact, but it stuck. The vinegar itself belongs to an older tradition of compound or aromatic vinegars — tarragon, elder flower, garlic, spice — that supplied the flavour a kitchen could not get from fresh herbs out of season. Long pepper in the list is the tell of an old formula copied forward: by the time this book was printed it had largely vanished from Western spice racks, kept alive mostly in recipes nobody had bothered to update.