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Grow Your Own Flavorings
Herb vinegar gives a delicious flavor to salad dressing. From a five-cent package of mixed herb seed sown in the garden many different kinds will be available to the housekeeper. Tarragon, sweet basil, chervil, or a combination of several, such as thyme, savory, marjoram and sage, can be used. Crush the leaves and cover them with a good cider vinegar. Let this stand until it is fairly strong. Then add a little of it to the other vinegar or to the lemon-juice when you make salad dressing.-I. M., Jeffersonville, Vt.
A reader's note rather than a formal recipe, so the quantities are left to judgment. The essentials are sound: bruised herbs, decent vinegar, and enough time for the flavor to move across.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable ratio is loosely packed fresh herb leaves filling a pint jar about halfway, then vinegar to cover by an inch. Dried herbs are stronger by weight; a quarter cup to a pint is plenty.
- "Until it is fairly strong"Two weeks in a cool, dark cupboard suits most soft herbs, and tarragon and basil are often ready sooner. Taste on a spoon rather than by smell, since the vinegar's own sharpness masks the herb in the nose.
- Use a glass jarVinegar attacks metal. Avoid metal lids in direct contact with the liquid, and do not steep in a metal bowl or an unlined pan.
- Keep the leaves submergedAny leaf sitting above the vinegar line will darken and can mold. Weight it down or top up with more vinegar.
- Cider vinegar strengthBottled cider vinegar today runs about 5 percent acidity, which is what preserves the infusion. Reduced-acid or "drinking" vinegars are not a substitute for steeping fresh plant material.
- Strain before storingOnce the flavor is where you want it, strain out the leaves and bottle the vinegar. Left in indefinitely, the herbs turn bitter and the liquid goes muddy. Strained and capped, it keeps a year in the cupboard.
- Which herbs, and separatelyTarragon, chervil and basil each read clearly on their own; thyme, savory, marjoram and sage are assertive and better in the combination the writer suggests. Chervil fades fastest and is best used within a few months.
- Using itA teaspoon or two of herb vinegar in a standard vinaigrette is enough to register. Added to lemon juice, as suggested here, it stretches the acid without flattening it.
Herb vinegars are a long-established way of keeping a summer garden's flavor into winter, and tarragon vinegar in particular was well known in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-American cooking, where it stood in for fresh tarragon in dressings, sauces and mustards. What dates this entry is not the technique but the framing: its argument is economic, that a five-cent seed packet of mixed herbs yields flavorings a housekeeper would otherwise buy bottled. The contribution is credited by initials and town, and this one arrives from Jeffersonville, Vermont, in the voice of someone who had clearly done it.