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all the currants, skimmings, pieces, etc., left after making jelly, place in astone jar, cover with soft water previously boiled to purify it, let stand several days; in the meantime, take your apple peelings, without the cores, and put on in porcelain kettle, cover with water, boil twenty minutes, drain into a large stone jar; drain currants also into this jar, add all the rinsings from your molasses jugs, all dribs of syrups, etc., and when jar is full, drain off all that is clear into vinegar keg (where, of course, you have some good cider vinegar to start with). If not sweet enough, add brown sugar or molasses, cover the bung-hole with a piece of coarse netting, and set in the sun or by the kitchen stove. In making vinegar always remember to give it plenty of air, and it is better to have the cask or barrel (which should be of oak) only half full, so that the air may pass over as large a surface as possible. Vinegar must also have plenty of material, such as sugar, molasses, etc., to work upon. Never use alum or cream of tartar, as some advise, and never let your vinegar freeze. Paint your barrel or cask if you would have it durable. Company, sickness, or other circumstances may prevent making
This is a method for turning jelly-making waste into vinegar over weeks, not a dish to be cooked in an afternoon. The whole thing hinges on giving Acetobacter the two things it needs: sugar to eat and constant air.
- Start with live vinegarThe instruction to have "some good cider vinegar to start with" is the critical step. Modern supermarket vinegar is pasteurised and filtered and will not seed the barrel; use raw, unpasteurised cider vinegar with visible mother, or a mother purchased for the purpose.
- Soft water, boiled"Soft water" means rainwater or any water low in minerals, boiled to kill off competing organisms. Filtered or bottled water, cooled to room temperature, does the same job. Heavily chlorinated tap water will slow the culture.
- VesselsA stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock; any food-grade glass or ceramic vessel serves. A "porcelain kettle" is an enamelled pan, specified because iron and copper react with acid. That warning still holds for the finished vinegar.
- The barrel is optionalOak, half full, bung covered with netting, is simply a way to maximise the air-to-liquid surface while excluding flies. A wide glass jar covered with muslin and a rubber band achieves the same and lets you watch what is happening. "Paint your barrel" means the outside only.
- Warmth, not heatBy the kitchen stove is right; acetic fermentation runs best around 80F and stalls below about 60F. Full sun in a Southern summer can push it too hot and kill the culture, so a warm shaded corner is safer than a windowsill.
- Why not alum or cream of tartarBoth were sometimes recommended by other writers, apparently to sharpen or clear the vinegar, though the recipe gives no reason. Neither contributes to acetification, and cream of tartar is itself an acid that muddies any judgement of strength. The instruction to leave them out is sound.
- Apple cores excludedPeelings only, without the cores: seeds and core add bitterness and tannin, and the pips of apples contain amygdalin. Twenty minutes of boiling extracts the sugars and pectin from the skins.
- Timing and testingExpect two to three months before it tastes like vinegar, longer in a cool house. A film of mother on top is correct; fuzzy coloured mould, or a smell of solvent rather than sharpness, means the batch has gone wrong and should be discarded.
- Do not can with itHome vinegar of unknown strength should be used for the table, for dressings and for refrigerated pickles. Water-bath canning of pickles requires vinegar of a verified 5 percent acidity, which this method cannot guarantee without titration.
- The entry breaks offThe text ends mid-sentence at "may prevent making"; the page continues in the original book, and what follows is not reproduced here.
Vinegar-making from kitchen fragments belonged to the same household logic as the rest of The Dixie Cook Book: little that contained sugar was allowed to leave the house unfermented. Currant jelly was a summer fixture, and the skimmings, crushed fruit and syrup-slicked jars it left behind were sugar in dilute form, as were apple peelings from putting up sauce and the last inch clinging to a molasses jug. Cider vinegar was the workhorse acid of the American kitchen, needed for pickles, catsups, sweet-sour dressings and a good many home remedies, and buying it by the barrel was an expense a thrifty household could avoid. The chemistry behind the crock had been worked out only a couple of decades before this was written — Pasteur's studies of acetic fermentation in the 1860s established that it is the work of living bacteria requiring air — but the practical rules the cook gives here, plenty of air, plenty of sugar, no freezing, a live starter, are precisely what that chemistry demands.