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Celery Vinegar
Pour over one ounce of celery-seeds one quart of the best vinegar, having the celery-seeds dried and pounded, and let them steep in it for ten days, shaking it every day; then strain and pour into small bottles. It is very good for flavoring.
A steeped flavoring vinegar that needs no cooking and almost no equipment. The only real variables are the strength of your vinegar and how thoroughly you crush the seed.
- The quantities in modern termsOne ounce of celery seed is roughly 4 tablespoons, about a quarter cup by volume. One quart is 4 cups, and the finished yield is very close to that, less what the seeds absorb.
- Which vinegar"The best vinegar" in the 1890s would most likely have meant cider or white wine vinegar of good strength. Use one labelled 5 percent acidity; the acid is what keeps the infusion sound over months. Distilled white works but tastes flat and harsh next to cider.
- Pound, do not powderCracking the seeds opens them to the vinegar, which is the whole point of the instruction. A mortar or a few pulses in a spice grinder is enough. Ground to dust they turn the vinegar muddy and clog the strainer.
- Celery seed is strongThis is the seed of a wild form of celery rather than the blanched garden stalk, and it is bitter and camphorous in quantity. Taste at day five; if it is already assertive, strain early rather than running the full ten days.
- Steeping and shakingKeep it in a sealed glass jar at room temperature out of direct sun, and give it a shake daily as directed — the seeds settle and pack down otherwise. A metal lid will corrode, so use plastic-lined or lay plastic wrap under the lid.
- Straining and bottlingStrain through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a coffee filter, then bottle in clean, dry glass. Rinse the bottles with boiling water first and let them dry; residual moisture dilutes the vinegar at the neck, where mold starts.
- KeepingStored cool and dark it holds its flavor for six months to a year and stays safe well beyond that, though the aroma fades. Cloudiness or a slick "mother" forming is harmless in vinegar; off smells or fuzzy growth mean discard.
- What to do with itA teaspoon or two lifts a potato or chicken salad, coleslaw dressing, tomato juice, or a mignonette for oysters. The recipe itself claims no more than that it is "very good for flavoring"; such vinegars were a plausible way to season soups and stews when fresh celery was out of season.
Flavored vinegars filled a specific gap in the nineteenth-century larder: they carried the taste of a vegetable or herb through the months when the fresh article was unavailable or expensive, and they kept indefinitely without ice. Tarragon, shallot, garlic, horseradish and celery vinegars all appear in household books of the 1880s and 1890s, usually in a run of short entries much like this one. Celery seed itself comes from a wild form of Apium graveolens, closer to the old kitchen-garden smallage than to the blanched stalk celery that Victorian growers had made fashionable, and its concentrated flavor made it the cheapest way to get celery into a dressing or a soup out of season — the same logic that produced commercial celery salt in the same decades. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is unsurprising: celery was a signature of the Waldorf kitchen, where it appeared on relish trays in iced glass vases and in the apple-and-celery salad traditionally credited to him.