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Tarragon Vinegar (Pound of green tarragon partly)
1 pound of green tarragon, partly dried before using. 6 small onions. 1 ounce of long pepper. 3 quarts of white wine or cider vinegar. Put the whole in a stone jug, cork and let steep several weeks. Strain through a napkin or silk seive before using.
A straightforward cold infusion, and one of the few nineteenth-century preserving recipes that still works exactly as written. The only real difficulty is sourcing the ingredients at this scale.
- The hinge: wilt the tarragon first"Partly dried before using" is not decoration. Fresh tarragon is mostly water, and a pound of it will noticeably dilute three quarts of vinegar and weaken its acidity. Spread it on trays out of direct sun for a day or two until the leaves are limp and leathery but still green.
- A pound of tarragon is a great dealSupermarket tarragon comes in packets of half an ounce to an ounce, so a pound means sixteen to thirty-two of them. This is a recipe written for a kitchen with a herb bed. Kept to the recipe's own proportions, a pint of vinegar takes about 2½ oz partly dried tarragon, one small onion and a heaped teaspoon and a half of pepper.
- Long pepperPiper longum, a relative of black pepper with a hotter, sweeter finish, sold as catkin-like spikes by Indian and specialist spice merchants. An ounce is about a handful of whole spikes. Whole black peppercorns with a couple of allspice berries stand in acceptably.
- The stone jugStoneware kept the vinegar off metal, which acid corrodes; lead-glazed earthenware was a hazard with acids for the same period. Use glass with a plastic-lined or plastic lid; avoid bare metal lids, which will corrode and taint the vinegar within weeks.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied. Buy vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity or higher, and do not top the jar up with water at any point.
- "Several weeks"Three to four weeks at room temperature is plenty; most of the flavour comes out early in the steep. Left for months the herb goes brown and the flavour turns hay-like rather than anise-sharp.
- StrainingA napkin or silk sieve catches the fine leaf debris that clouds the finished vinegar and eventually sinks into a sludge. Coffee filters or a double layer of muslin do the same job. Strain out every scrap of onion and leaf, then bottle and cap tightly.
- Yield and useAbout three quarts, which keeps a year or more in a cool dark cupboard. Use it for béarnaise, for vinaigrette on cold chicken or asparagus, and in place of plain vinegar in a mustard-cream sauce.
Tarragon vinegar was the standard way of keeping tarragon before freezing and freeze-drying, since the herb loses almost all its character when dried outright and its season is short. French kitchens treated it as a pantry staple, and it is the acid in the classic béarnaise reduction; English and American households bought it or, as here, made it at home. Long pepper, the third ingredient, is worth noticing: once common in European cookery, it had largely been driven out of domestic kitchens by black pepper by the eighteenth century, and its survival in a recipe like this one is a small fossil of an older spice trade.