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Tarragon Vinegar (Green tarragon is a herb)
Green tarragon is a herb and can be bought of the market gardeners in large cities. It is said to be best and strongest just as the plant is going into blossom. 1 pound of tarragon leaves. 4 quarts of white wine vinegar. Let steep in a stone jar two weeks.
Then filter it through a flannel jelly bag, add to it a quarter ounce of isinglass (gelatine will do) dissolved in warm cider or vinegar, to clarify it, bottle it and let it stand a month, when it is to be decanted into small bottles to keep.
But hotel cooks can never do all that, which is a foreign method for phlegmatic people. Reader, did you ever go into the bar-room of a back country hotel--say in Missouri--though Peck's Sun says Iowa--and see on the back shelf a series of home made extracts, jars of whiskey with something in it? One of these is tansy--green tansy leaves put in to flavor the liquor. That is for tansy bitters. Another has peaches. That is for peach and sugar. Others have cherries, lemon peel, orange peel. They are for we know not what. But tarragon can be steeped in cold vinegar like tansy in whisky, and half a pint of flavored vinegar thus be had at any time. Use it sparingly in place of part of the plain vinegar in any of the salad dressings, not flavoring strongly, however, as tarragon is a stranger to most of our people.
A flavored vinegar in two versions: the formal French infusion with a clarifying step, and Whitehead's shortcut for cooks who have no month to spare. The shortcut is the one worth making.
- Scale it downA pound of leaves to four quarts of vinegar is a restaurant batch and a very assertive one. For household use, pack a clean pint jar loosely with sprigs, top with white wine vinegar, and steep at room temperature two weeks, shaking occasionally.
- Use French tarragonOnly French tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa) has the anise-and-vanilla note wanted here. Russian tarragon, which is what most seed packets grow, is coarse and nearly flavorless. Harvest just before flowering, as the text says it is then reckoned strongest.
- Stone jar means nonreactiveGlazed stoneware or glass, never bare aluminum, copper, cast iron or unlined tin. Vinegar will strip metal and pick up the taste. Use a plastic-lined lid for the same reason.
- Isinglass and the clarifying stepIsinglass is a fish-derived gelatin once used to fine wine and jelly. It is entirely optional here; the vinegar is only cloudy from leaf debris, and straining through a coffee filter or a double layer of cheesecloth gives a clear bottle without it.
- Bruise, do not chopCrush the stems lightly with the back of a knife before they go in the jar. Finely chopped leaves release chlorophyll and grassy notes and make the strain tedious.
- Dried tarragon worksIf fresh is unavailable, use about 3 tablespoons dried per pint and shorten the steep to a week, tasting as you go. Dried leaf gives up its oil faster and can turn hay-like if left too long.
- StorageStrain out the herb before long storage; leaves left submerged for months go slimy and dull the flavor. A fresh sprig added to the finished bottle is decorative and keeps well enough in the acid, but discard the bottle if the vinegar ever looks murky or smells of anything but tarragon and wine.
- Using itWhitehead's advice holds. Replace a quarter to a half of the plain vinegar in a vinaigrette, not all of it. It also belongs in béarnaise, in a mustard, and in a chicken or egg salad.
Tarragon vinegar came to American kitchens by way of French cookery, where vinaigre à l'estragon was standard pantry stock and the base for béarnaise; the herb's French name, along with the English "tarragon," is generally traced through Arabic and Greek to a word for dragon, supposedly for the shape of its root. Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men who ran hotel and railroad kitchens in the 1880s and 90s, and the passage is characteristic of him: he gives the textbook method, then dismisses it as unworkable for a working cook and offers the jar-on-the-back-shelf alternative instead. The bar-room extracts he describes were real practice, whiskey standing on fruit and herbs to make a house bitters or cordial, and Peck's Sun was George W. Peck's Milwaukee humor paper, a joke his readers would have caught at once. His closing note that tarragon "is a stranger to most of our people" is the useful historical detail here: as late as the 1890s the herb was still a specialty item bought from market gardeners in large cities, not something an American cook was assumed to know.