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Fine Herbs Vinegar
Take equal quantities of tarragon, burnet, chervil and cress, all of which should have been gathered the day before. Fill a wide-mouthed bottle or jar with this, adding also two cloves of garlic and a green pepper. Cover the whole with vinegar, cork the bottle tightly, and place it in a warm temperature for a fortnight. Strain the vinegar through a fine hair-sieve, pressing the herbs well. Then filter through paper until quite clear. Pour into bottles and keep tightly corked.
A cold-infused herb vinegar of the sort a hotel kitchen kept on hand for salad dressings and sauces. Nothing here has changed much except the availability of the herbs and the vessels.
- Start with strong vinegarUse a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — white wine or cider vinegar suits these herbs. Acidity is what preserves the infusion and keeps the garlic safe; do not dilute it or substitute a low-acid "drinking" vinegar.
- Burnet and cressSalad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) tastes faintly of cucumber and is a garden herb rather than a supermarket one. "Cress" here is most likely garden or curly cress, though the word was also used loosely for watercress; if neither is available, weight the mix toward tarragon and chervil rather than padding it out with parsley.
- Gathered the day beforeThe overnight wait most likely lets surface moisture evaporate and the leaves wilt slightly, though the recipe does not say why. Water diluted into the vinegar lowers its acidity, so if you buy the herbs, wash them and spread them out to dry thoroughly before packing the jar.
- The green pepperAmbiguous in 1896 — it could mean a green bell pepper or a small green chile. A single mild green chile gives the faint heat the recipe seems to want; a whole bell pepper adds mostly water.
- "A warm temperature" for a fortnightThe recipe gives no figure. A sunny windowsill or a warm shelf, say somewhere in the 70-85F range, for fourteen days. Shake the jar every few days. Cooler than that and you simply need longer.
- Cork and metalVinegar corrodes metal lids and the rubber in some modern caps. Use glass with a plastic-lined closure, or lay plastic wrap under a metal lid.
- Straining and filteringA hair sieve is a fine-mesh sieve, originally woven of horsehair; press the herbs hard, then run the liquid through a paper coffee filter. Paper filtering is slow, but it is what separates a clear keeping vinegar from a cloudy one that throws sediment.
- Keeping and yieldKeeping -- Filtered and tightly stoppered the vinegar keeps a year in a cool dark cupboard; a haze or a gelatinous "mother" forming later is harmless but means it should be strained again or used up.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, worked in a kitchen still organised on French lines, and this is vinaigre aux fines herbes under an English label. The classical fines herbes quartet is parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon; the substitution here of salad burnet and garden cress arguably points to an older Anglo-American kitchen-garden tradition, where burnet's cucumber note and cress's pepper were standard salad flavourings long before either became a rarity. Flavoured vinegars mattered more then than now: a hotel larder would often make its own tarragon, elder-flower and chili vinegars, and a spoonful of herb vinegar was the quickest way to lift a mayonnaise, a cold sauce or a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing at service.