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Celery Vinegar
Soak one ounce of celery seed in half a pint of vinegar; bottle it and use to flavour soups and gravies.
A flavoured vinegar of the simplest kind: seed, vinegar, bottle, wait. The original gives no steeping time, which is the one thing a modern cook needs.
- The measurementsHalf a pint is 8 to 10 fl oz depending on whether the measure is American or imperial; in a Canadian book of this date the imperial half pint (about 284 ml) is the likelier reading. One ounce of celery seed is roughly three to four tablespoons, which is a heavy dose for that volume and gives a concentrated flavouring rather than a salad vinegar.
- Steeping timeThe recipe says only "soak." Two to three weeks in a cool, dark cupboard gives full extraction; a week is enough for a usable flavour. Shake the bottle every day or two.
- Strain or don'tThe text implies the seed stays in the bottle, and it will keep strengthening. If you want a fixed strength, strain through a coffee filter once it tastes right and rebottle.
- Which vinegarHousehold vinegar in this period was usually cider or malt. Cider vinegar suits soups and gravies best; distilled white is sharper and flatter. Anything at 5 percent acidity is fine.
- Celery seed is not celeryIt comes from smallage, the wild ancestor of table celery, and is far more bitter and aromatic than the stalk. Buy it fresh — seed that has sat in a cupboard for two years will give you dust-flavoured vinegar.
- KeepingThe acidity keeps it safe at room temperature for a long time, though the flavour fades over months. Use a glass bottle with a plastic or cork-lined cap; vinegar corrodes bare metal lids.
- Using itA teaspoon or two at the end of cooking, stirred into a gravy, soup, or a court bouillon. It also stands in for celery salt in dressings and in a tomato juice drink, though you then add the salt separately.
Flavoured vinegars filled a real gap in the Victorian pantry: celery seed kept for years in a jar, and bottling the flavour in vinegar meant a cook could reach for celery out of season. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by Canadian women, sits squarely in this tradition of small preservation economies — tarragon, garlic, chilli and celery vinegars all appear in cookbooks of the period. Celery seed itself comes from smallage, the bitter wild plant that European gardeners bred into the mild blanched stalks of the table, and it carried a reputation as a warming, digestive seasoning long before it was a supermarket spice.