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Tarragon Vinegar
This adjunct to flavoring sauces and salads can be had at the grocery stores, about thirty-five cents a pint bottle. But it is easily made at home if you buy tarragon plants from a large florist, and by planting them in the garden, or in boxes, the fresh leaves will be useful all summer, so that in the fall, before frost, what is left can be made into vinegar. This plan gives a constant supply for a year. Gather the leaves on a dry day, wash them to remove insects, dry them, and after bruising them, adding about a pint to a quart of wine vinegar, add a tablespoonful each of chopped parsley and chives. Infuse for a week, strain it, and bottle closely.
A straightforward cold infusion that still works exactly as written; the only real variables are which tarragon you use and how strong your vinegar is.
- Get French tarragon, not RussianOnly French tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa) has the anise-sweet perfume this is after. It sets no viable seed, so it is sold as plants — which may well be why the recipe sends you to a florist rather than a seed packet. Anything grown from seed labelled "tarragon" is the coarse, nearly flavourless Russian type.
- The proportion"About a pint to a quart" means a pint of leaves by volume, loosely packed, to a quart (4 cups) of vinegar. It is a generous ratio and gives an assertive vinegar; half that quantity of leaves still perfumes the bottle well.
- Use a 5 to 6 percent wine vinegarWhite wine vinegar is the usual choice and keeps the colour pale green-gold. Check the label for acidity: standard supermarket vinegars are 5 percent, which is acidic enough to keep the herbs safely. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute anything homemade of unknown strength.
- Dry the leaves properlyAfter washing, spread the leaves and let them dry completely before bruising. Water clinging to the leaves dilutes the vinegar at the surface, and that is where spoilage would start.
- Bruise, do not chop to a pulpA firm roll with a pin or a press between the palms splits the cells and releases the oils. Pureed leaves cloud the vinegar and make it tedious to strain clear.
- Keep everything submergedAny leaf standing proud of the vinegar can mould. Weight the herbs down with a small glass disc or simply top up the jar. Infuse at room temperature out of direct light.
- A week, then tasteSeven days is right for a warm kitchen; a cool one may want ten. Strain through a coffee filter or doubled muslin for a bright bottle, and use scalded, thoroughly dry bottles with non-metal caps — vinegar corrodes bare metal lids.
- Yield and keepingOne quart of vinegar, near enough. Stored cool and dark it holds its flavour for about a year, which is the annual cycle the author has in mind. A whole sprig dropped into the finished bottle looks handsome but is decorative, not preservative.
Tarragon's name is traditionally traced through the French estragon to the Latin dracunculus, "little dragon" — explained by the plant's coiling, serpentine roots, though the herbals also invoked it against the bites of venomous creatures; the word has also been widely derived from the Arabic tarkhun, and the connection remains disputed. Vinaigre d'estragon was a fixture of the nineteenth-century French kitchen, the acid base of b onaise and the standard sharpener for a plain vinaigrette, and it reached Anglo-American cooks along with the rest of the French sauce repertoire. What dates this entry is the economics: the author quotes the shop price at thirty-five cents a pint, a real sum at the time, and offers the garden version as the thrifty alternative. The instruction to buy plants rather than seed is not fussiness but botany — French tarragon does not come true from seed and is generally propagated by division or cuttings, so a florist or nurseryman was the usual source then, as now.