ISSUE 22, PICKLES, Part 1: Vinegar

Early American Vinegar Making

Unfiltered Apple Cider Vinegar

Early American Vinegar Making

In 1822, the archpriest of cookery in the English Speaking World, William Kitchiner, excommunicated the pickle from the high table of fine dining: “We  are not fond of Pickles,--these Sponges of Vinegar are often very Indigestible, especially in the crisp state in which they are most admired.” The Cook’s Oracle p. 520.  Of all of the oracles that Kitchiner pronounced, this would be that which had least traction for his American readers. He had deluded himself into believing that pickles were all about the acid. Acetic acid was only the instrument.  What mattered were the vegetables, nuts, eggs,  and meats preserved  in the liquid.  We little grasp today how heartening and nourishing it was to a New Englander to bite into a crisp green bean when February snow covered fields.  Sweat peas, those delicate orbs of early Spring,  most beloved of garden vegetables for colonial Anglo-Americans, could speak their verdant message on the tongues of winter-weary folk because brine and vinegar had kept them unspoiled and green.

Spoilage has not ceased to be a foremost concern regarding food.  Today, when refrigeration, cryo-freezing, radiation, chemical inoculation, pasteurization, desiccation, vacuolization, and a host of other techniques prolong the shelf life or expiration date of foodstuffs, there is no denying the truth of the ancient wisdom:  the flesh perishes—whether animal or vegetable.  Organic matter degrades. It  is constituted to degrade through a host of chemical and physical interactions with its surroundings. 

The pickle was one of the most pleasant and oldest of the prolongers. In part because we have loved the taste of the agent which kept spring and summer alive, the pickle has never ceased to be a popular item of consumption, despite the dictates of the archons of taste.  Vinegar matters.  The cucumbers, peas, greenbeans, peas, beans, cauliflowers, radishes, Jerusalem artichokes, cabbages, melons, onions, lemons, mangoes, nasturtiums, peppers, tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus, peaches, cherries matter as much.  Yet Kitchiner intuited one profound truth:  vinegar plus a vegetable too often created a disparity of flavor favoring the sour.  A third dimension had to be added to overthrow the domination of acid—seasonings and spices. 

The 19th century became the heyday of the pickle in the United States precisely because all three components of the pickle—the vegetables, the vinegar, and the spices—enjoyed an extraordinary elaboration from the 1820s through the 1880s.  Botanical experiment exploded the number of fruits and vegetables in cultivation.  American trade, particularly with Asia, India, and South America, procured an apothecary’s chest of novel spices and herbs. Even vinegar ramified into a range of  substances, producing liquids more complex and various in their flavor profiles than the simple designation ‘vinegar’ suggests.  Because the acid medium is that component of the pickle least regarded, it might be particularly informative to turn attention to it first. 

EXPERIMENTS WITH ACID 

The name vinegar points to the origin of the substance.  It is a product of the vine, the offspring of wine. Vinegar from the French vin aigre, sour wine.  In the creation of wine, vinous fermentation converts fruit sugar into alcohol. Once the sugar is all converted, the young vintage is casked, or bottled and corked, to inhibit the liquid’s contact with the air.  If air invades the barrier, a second fermentation might occur, one in which alcohol transmutes chemically into acetic acid.[1]  The air carries spores of a  B naturally occurring fungus, Mycoderma aceti, that thrives upon vinous ethanol.  A slimy skin (the mother) form’s on the wine’s as fungi multiply (the derma of the mycoderma), until the nourishment of the alcohol was exhausted, or the intervention of other microbes altered the process, causing putrifaction.   At warmer temperatures (80-85 degrees f is optimum) wine’s change into vinegar takes place rather quickly.  In cooler places, the transformation might take a season. 

Several practical observations emerged among vinegar makers before Louis Pasteur identified the role of Mycoderma aceti in the fermentation process.  First, if you increased the surface area of the wine exposed to the air, the quicker the fermentation.  Second, exposure of the open vats of liquid to the sun inhibited the creation of noxious substances during the fermentation process.  Third, that running wine through a jumble of beech wood shavings or grape vine twigs accelerated the acetous fermentation.  Pasteur in a memorable scientific brawl with Justus Leibig, the pioneering theorist of plant and animal nutrition, showed by microscopic evidence, the concentration of Mycoderma aceti on the surface of beech twigs.[2]  Any large scale manufacture of vinegar incorporated these observations, and the idea that to maintain consistency and perpetuity of the ferment, a multiple cask system had to be used to (1) agitate the liquid, and (2) replenish the mother with fresh wine, and (3) maintain a consistency of flavor in vinegar over time. 

The United States, alas, had great difficulty mastering the art of viticulture.  Regular vintages of good quality wide only came on the market in the mid-1820s, with the work of Nicholas Herbemont.  Large scale production and distribution of wines did not take place under Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati, Ohio, made sparkling Catawba a fashionable taste in the latter 1830s.  Given the scarcity of American wine on the market, the employment of a substantial portion of the year’s crush to vinegar making was not undertaken.  Those with a taste for wine vinegar had it imported, at a rather stiff duty, from Europe.  White wine vinegar from Orleans, France, was markedly preferred over red. The favorite imported wine of the antebellum era—Madeira—was deemed so precious that it never suffered acetic fermentation.

In the absence of wine vinegar, the pickle makers of the United States, resorted to three traditional alternatives: cider vinegar, malt vinegar, and honey vinegar.  They also experimented with new sorts of vinegar made possible by the proliferation of sugar: cane syrup vinegar and fruit wine vinegar.  Unfortunately some picklers made use of another innovation, wood vinegar, or pyroligneous acid, a strong flavored common liquid byproduct of the charcoal manufacturing process.  Wood vinegar had a sharp concentration of acetic acid and some inevitable wood tars.  The liquid was colored with burnt sugar to give it a malty brown hue.  The sugar could not, however, mask the flavor of charred wood; indeed, the chief culinary use of pyroligneous acid in the 21st century occurs in artificial smoke mixtures.  The hallmark of poor pickle making in the 19th century was the saturation of fruits and vegetables with malt vinegars adulterated with pyroligneous acid, imparting a sharp burnt flavor.[3]

It cannot be said that much creativity was applied to refining either honey or malt vinegar. The fermentation methods had been imported wholesale from England and applied with great fidelity.  Honey vinegar was the simplest and easiest to make, producing a mellow tasting acid. One did not need to add a flavoring agent.  Dissolve a pound of honey into three quarts of warm (80 degree f) water.[4]  Keep in an open container covered with cheesecloth.  This would let the natural yeast to access the mixture, but protect the liquid from houseflies.  In short order it would sour to a piquant vinegar.  The risk of this method lies in the vagary of local yeast strains, some of which might impart a sharp rather than a mellow flavor to the vinegar.  Bee-keepers often made the manufacture and sale of honey vinegar a side source of revenue.

In England, where beer was commonplace, persons tended to make vinegar from malt. Malt is a grain mixture comprised of 5 parts buckwheat, to 7 parts wheat, to 18 parts barley that are ground, mixed, and boiled.   Hot water is added to a mash of malt, creating wort.  When the temperature subsides to 75 degrees Fahr, the brewers mix in four gallons of yeast.  The mixture percolates for 36 hours, then put into specially prepared paired casks.   These casks have a mesh or perforated partition upon which raisins or grape vine twigs (rape)  that the liquid covers.  These provide the fermentation fungus. The paired casks are filled to variable heights—one 1/3rd full, the other 2/3rds.  Since the fermentation is more violent in the cask with the lesser height, the process is smoothed by shifting the levels back and forth between the casks every other day. Home brewing took place throughout European-settled North America, and its adjunt, malt vinegar making became ubiquitous as well.  But the landrace grains that furnished the raw materials for the malt did not greatly alter by plant breeding, so the improvement of the wort by the improvement of the ingredients did not take place.  The same, however could not be said about cider and the vinegar made from it.  The creation of new varieties of apples and crab apples caused American cider to develop distinctive and compelling new kinds of taste.  The vinegar carried these distinctions into the realm of the sour.

Cider was the most important table beverage produced by American farmers.  When expertly made, it seemed a “fine racy liquor, superior for the table to the common wines of France, Spain and Italy.”[5] When botched, “harsh, turbid and unpalatable.” Seasoned cider makers knew that the juicy, plush-flavored fruit prized at the table did not produce the best cider.  Indeed, the most useful apples for the cider press tended to be “small, knotty, dry, and austere.” In England in the 1820s,  orchardists favored several versatile apples, good for the table and the press: the Golden Pippen, the Downton. They also prized the Hagloe crabapple as cider fruit because of its pronounced flavor.  In America, the old English Styre apple, because it produced the heaviest, most sugar-saturated must, stood first in the esteem of traditional cider-makers generally.   (In the 1810s, producers realized that the specific gravity of juice from the press, influenced taste, and began seeking out varieties of fruit that produced densely sugared liquid.  Each region discovered favorite varieties, giving cider a local zest:  in Virginia, the Greyhouse, Carthouse and Cooper’s russeting; in New York, the Harrison and Campfield apples, in West Jersey, the Winesap.  Into the must, the juice of the Hewes or Roan crabapples were mixed as an accent.  Orchardists were counseled to grow few varieties, well separated, and to minimize the mixing of varieties, because different varieties ripen at different times, and because flavor confuses when the juice of more than two apple varieties are intermingled.  When mixing occurred, a moderate measure of crabapple must would be added to a substantial pressing of a cider apple—a Winesap or a Harrison. 

At harvest time workers gather the apples when dry, lay them out on a clean floor, cover them with burlap, and age them until they become mellow.  When the weather turns cold the apples are brought to the cider house and ground into pomice—apple mash. The cider-maker collects the pomice in a wooden trough and lets it sit for a day. Then it is extruded in the press, where the juice is extruded slowly, passed through a filter to eliminate flecks of pulp and rind, and gathered in open hogsheads/vats/casks. The pulp and rind from the pressing proved excellent feed for livestock.  The casks of cider remained open in the cold house until scum formed and then broke apart on the surface of the liquid.  The maker knew that it was ready for racking into bottles when the “steam of the cider will sting your nose when held to the bung hole.”[6]

Several things could make the cider go wrong.  Mixing rotten apples with whole, ripe fruit (there was a temptation among large scale producers to use fruit fallen on the ground that had begun to spoil).  Failing to clean barrels and casks sufficiently after each year’s racking (moldy casks gave rise to a musty-flavored brew that would quickly turn to vinegar). And neglecting to let the pomice sit for a full 24 hours (which could give rise to “thin” apple juice instead of “full-bodied” cider).[7]

In the manufacture of cider vinegar the maker interrupts vinous fermentation by adding a gallon of rain water to a barrel of fresh pressed apples juice and storing the cask in a warm dry place for four months.  Exposure to air, of course, hastened the process that transformed vinous to acetous fermentation.  Theoretically any storage vessel that had not been filled and tightly bunged after the conversion of fructose into alochol, would change from hard cider to cider vinegar. Indeed farmers resorted to tricks such as the addtion of mustard seeds to the cider to inhibit the alteration from occurring.

Once vinegar had been formed, boiling or freezing it stopped the process of decomposition and stabilized the substance.  The practice of sharpening a vinegar in colder regions by freezing it and separating off the ice float simply concentrated the acid.

In the 1850s the role of volatile ethers given off in the processing of fruits, spices, and aromatic vegetables in the production of perfume and the fermenting of beverages became generally known in the world of agricultural letters.  The tweaking of the taste profile of wines by the manipulation of ethers became a matter of course in France during this decade.  What it produced in the general public was a consciousness of flavor as a chemical matter.  The breeding of cider apples was largely driven by a concern to get more piquant, clearer flavors.  But the vast majority of experimentation with flavor making took place at home by farmwives and amateur vingerons creating sugar-based fruit wines.

The ready supply of loaf sugar throughout the United States gave rise to  two approaches to the creation of fruit vinegars:  the more classic method was to create a fruit wine and subject it to acetous fermentation; the novel method was to create sugar-based vinegar and flavor it with fruit.[8]  The recipe for the latter proved to have been rather straightforward, something easily undertaken by a householder. One added ten pounds of sugar to eight gallons of water.  The mixture was boiled, and when cooled room temperature, supplied with yeast and a flavoring agent—raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries, dried crushed rose leaves, red pepper, or raisins. Batches were made in late spring or early summer, placed in stoneware bottles, lightly corked and exposed to the sun.  Fermentation took the whole of the summer, with the vinegar ready for fall pickling of the vegetable and fruit harvest.  The American Farmer (V. 4) offered a rough and ready variant of this recipe.  ‘To ten gallons of rain water add one gallon of molasses and one of brandy—mix them well together, and place the cask in a garret or some dry warm place, and occasionally shaking it, in a few months it will be fit for use.”

More elaborate and more pronounced in taste were the sugar-based fruit and vegetable wines subjected to acetous fermentation, by the addition of grape twigs, rain water, or beech shavings, and kept warm.  The earliest American cookbooks abound in recipes for these wines:  Apricot (Carter 1803),  Birch (Carter 1803),  Blackberry, Currant (Emerson 1808), Cowslip Wine, Damson (Emerson 1808),  Elderberry (Carter 1803),  Ginger (American Domestic Cookery 1823),  Gooseberry Champagne (Leslie’s 1846),  Gooseberry Wine (Carter 1803),  Morella Cherry (Leslie’s 1846),  Peach (American Farmer 1825),  Quince (Carter 1803),  Raspberry (Carter 1803), Sassafras (Howland 1845).   In the mid-century Rhubarb, Parsnip, and Tomato wines entered the repertoire.  In England, Frederick Accum’s 1820 A Treatise on the Art of Making Wine from Native Fruits presented a detailed primer on the creation of these beverages.  Accum ardently advocated home manufacture of wines and vinegars because he had become convinced that commercial manufactures criminally adulterated their products. He despised the means by which commercial manufacturers sharpened the bite of vinegar by admixing sulphuric acid, enriched the color of the liquid with burnt sugar. But his harshest criticism

Fell upon those who used poisonous substances in the vinegar to heighten the visual aesthetic of pickled green vegetables. 

Because of the heavy winter consumption of both pickled and canned vegetables, they shared a preoccupation with seeming fresh—whether presenting a vividly green color or a marked crunch in the teeth.  Unfortunately both impressions were frequently achieved by spurious means. In Accum’s lurid treatise on food adulteration, Death in a Pot (1820), we learn that copper sulfate poisoning became commonplace in Europe and America from boiling pickle vinegar with copper items or compounds to impart a verdigris tinge to cooked green vegetables. “Vegetable substances preserved in the state called pickles by means of the antiseptic power of vinegar, whose sale frequently demands greatly upon a fine, lively green colour, and the consumption of which by seafaring people in particular, is prodigious, are sometimes intentionally coloured by means of copper. . .  . Numerous fatal consequences are known to have ensued from the use of these stimulants on the palate, to which the fresh and pleasing hue has been imparted according to the deadly formulae laid down in in some modern cookery books; such as boiling the pickle with halfpence, or suffering them to stand for a considerable period in brazen vegetables.”   Some picklers arrived at crispness by using unripe fruits and vegetables.  While not lethal, flavor suffered, since none of the natural glucose, fructose, sucrose had developed sufficiently to give the mellowness of taste that is the experiential hallmark of ripeness. 

Accum’s warnings resounded on both sides of the Atlantic, and did much to encourage the home industries of wine-making, vinegar brewing, and pickling.  Because of his suspicion of distilled forms of wood vinegar—increasingly used as a vehicle for flavored vinegars—herb-infused liquids—he was largely responsible for the retention of the more expensive white wine vinegar as the preferred medium for this kind of flavored vinegar. 

When we consider the options available to the pickle maker during the heyday of American pickling, we see an inspiring range of options—from various sorts of cider vinegars, traditional malt and honey vinegars, and an artisanal trove of fruit and vegetable wine vinegars.  These last offered interesting means by which to intensify the flavor of certain pickled fruits, because one could pickle peaches in peach wine vinegar, or cherries in cherry vinegar, or tomato in tomato vinegar. 

[1] The chemical composition of acetic acid and ethanol/alcohol were both adduced in 1814, by Berzelius and De Saussure.  The knowledge spread throughout the Atlantic world, inspiring a widespread effort to quicken the time of fermentation experimentally. Charles M. Wetherill, The Manufacture of Vinegar: its Theory and Practice (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1860), p. 21. [2] Harold Finegold, “The Liebig-Pasteur Controversy,” Journal of Chemical Education 31, 8 (1954), p. 403. [3]The Tricks of the Trade in the Adulterations of Food and Physic (London:  Routledge, Warne, & Routledge, 1859), p. 136.  [4] “Vinegar Made from Honey,” New England Farmer 4, 29 (Feb. 10, 1826), p. 229. [5]J. Buel, “Cider Apples,” NEF 4, 26 (March 31, 1826), p. 282. [6] A Farmer, “Hints on Making Cider,” NEF 4, 16 (November 11, 1825). [7] L. W. “Cider,” NEF 4-10 (September 30, 1825). [8] Thomas Webster & Mrs. William Parks, An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy (London: Spotiswoode & Shaw, 1852), p. 663-65.