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Clover Vinegar
Put a large bowl of molasses in a crock, and pour over it nine bowls of boiling rain-water; let stand until milk-warm, put in two quarts of clover blossoms, and two cups of baker's yeast; let this stand two weeks, and strain through a towel. Nothing mold Nothing will mold in it. -Mrs. McAlister, Goshen,
A household vinegar built on molasses, wild clover blossoms and yeast, from the era when every kitchen kept a vinegar crock going. The proportions are workable, but the timing and the sanitation assumptions need revisiting.
- The "bowl" is a ratio, not a measureThe recipe is really one part molasses to nine parts water, ten bowlfuls in all, with no way to know the size of the bowl meant. Scale the 1:9 ratio to whatever crock you have.
- Rain-waterDo not collect and use roof runoff. Modern roofing, gutters and air deposition make it unfit to drink, and this liquid is never boiled again after the initial pour. Use filtered drinking water.
- Baker's yeast then and nowTwo cups meant a wet barm or a soft compressed cake stirred into liquid, not two cups of modern granulated yeast. A packet of active dry yeast, or a comparable weight of fresh cake yeast, is enough for this volume.
- Two weeks is not enoughYeast turns the molasses sugar to alcohol in about that time; converting alcohol to acetic acid takes acetobacter and considerably longer, typically one to three months at 70-80F. Adding a cup of unpasteurized vinegar with live mother speeds and secures the second stage.
- Air is the hingeAcetic fermentation is aerobic. Cover the crock with cheesecloth against insects but never seal it, and keep the surface area wide. A sealed vessel will give you a weak molasses beer instead of vinegar.
- The cloverTwo quarts of blossoms are flavor and wild-yeast inoculum. Pick from ground you know has not been sprayed, take them dry and fully open, and shake out insects before measuring.
- "Nothing will mold in it"Optimistic. A white wrinkled kahm yeast or fuzzy colored mold can form on the surface before the acidity is high enough to protect the batch; skim it off promptly and check that the liquid smells sharp rather than sour-sweet.
- Do not use it for canningHome vinegar of unknown strength has no place in pickling or preserving, where 5 percent acetic acid is the safety floor. Treat this as a table and cooking vinegar, and buy commercial vinegar for anything sealed in a jar.
Many households made their own vinegar rather than buying it, and cookbooks of the period carry several ways to make it from whatever sugar was cheapest locally: cider in apple country, maple sap in the north, sorghum or cane molasses through the South and lower Midwest. The book credits named contributors, and Mrs. McAlister of Goshen is doing what a thrifty cook did with the tail end of a molasses barrel. The clover blossoms serve double duty, carrying wild yeasts and acetic bacteria from the field and lending a faint honeyed note to a liquid that would otherwise taste flatly of burnt sugar.