The Armchair James Beard by James Beard

Author:James Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504004558
Publisher: Open Road Media

Even Vinegar Has a Mother

The recent vogue for flavored vinegars in nouvelle cuisine dishes is, to my mind, more a matter of fashion than of taste. Some of the flavor combinations are so bizarre I cannot imagine how one might be expected to use the stuff. I tasted a French white wine vinegar the other day with bright red chili peppers in it. The pale gold vinegar was a lovely color, as were the red peppers, but it tasted awful. What salad greens could possibly stand up to that kind of competition?

And I can’t help chuckling to myself over the raspberry vinegar craze. Country folk have been making raspberry vinegar for generations, but it was never intended to go in sauces for defenseless little quail or in salads. It’s a drink—not to be imbibed neat, of course, but mixed with ice and lots of sparkling water it’s very refreshing on a hot day. Raspberry vinegar is made by steeping the equivalent of twenty-four baskets of ripe raspberries in a gallon of cider vinegar or malt vinegar, then clearing off the fruit and repeating with another tray of raspberries. These steps are continued until you achieve a really aromatic brew.

Not too very long ago, you could buy a vinegar “mother,” the natural yeast culture that, put into wine, turns wine into vinegar. It was sold for a few cents in a little glass jar and looked somewhat like a jellyfish. Contrary to popular belief, old wine will not turn into vinegar if simply left in the bottle; it will merely die. To make vinegar, you need a mother.

I remember buying some in Lancaster or Reading, in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I took this culture back to New York and put it into a five-gallon jar. For years, I made my own vinegar by adding my leftover wine to it. The ground-glass stopper was left very loose to allow essential air circulation. My vinegar contained some pretty fine vintages, I can tell you. Well, I went off to Europe on a trip and someone rammed the stopper down while I was gone, with lamentable results. It smothered mother.

People have made their own vinegar for centuries, and before the days when citrus fruit was common, cooks would use a few drops of vinegar instead of a squeeze of lemon to point up the flavors in a dish. Of course, vinegar has always been used in pickling. And in Colonial times, cider vinegar was used in folk medicine for an extraordinary assortment of ills as well as in cooking. I know people who still swear by cider vinegar and honey to cure a cough.

The English have always been partial to malt vinegar, a predilection that spread to Canada. Canadians automatically sprinkle malt vinegar on their french fries (whereas Americans favor sweet tomato ketchup, and the Dutch like mustard mayonnaise).

Verjuice—literally, “green juice”—is an earlier type of cider vinegar distilled from crab apples, and it was used in cookery right up until the nineteenth century, especially in meat and game pies.

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