The Miracle of Vinegar. Emma Marsden
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Peaches With Verjus and Rosemary
Chocolate Sharing Mousse With Blueberries and Pecans
Golden Pavlova
BREAD AND BAKING
Chilli and Thyme Cornbread
Courgette and Carrot Loaf
Seeded Soda Bread
PICKLES AND PRESERVES
Red, White and Green Piccalilli
Pickled Pears With Star Anise and Ginger
Spiced Plums With Cinnamon, Juniper and Black Pepper
Super-quick Bowl of Chutney
About the Publisher
Vinegar first came into my working life while I was at Good Housekeeping magazine in the early 1990s. I was director of the Institute and in this role I oversaw both the consumer testing and cookery departments. Each year, the January issue of the magazine carried a ‘Stains Special’… and vinegar always featured prominently.
When, in 2002, I was asked to do a screen test for a new television programme about cleaning, I drew on my GH experience and rattled off a list of all the kooky remedies I had picked up over the years, and again vinegar enjoyed multiple name-checks.
I passed the screen test, got the TV gig and co-presented How Clean is Your House? on Channel 4 from 2003 to 2009. My co-presenter and I generally used old-fashioned, inexpensive and homespun remedies for clean-ups – and very soon vinegar became the star of the show.
I am currently, about once a month, the ‘Midnight Expert’ guest on the BBC Radio 5 Live Phil Williams show. People call in and text between midnight and 1am with their cleaning quandaries – it’s strange but true, there is never any shortage of queries, even at that late hour. So often have I named vinegar as the solution to removing a stain that Phil, a good while back, instigated ‘Aggie’s Vinegar Bingo’, in which a big shout-out goes to the caller who, during the on-air hour, nails the nearest time to the V-word first getting a mention. Who knew vinegar could create so much buzz?
Vinegar is said to have been discovered by accident around 10,000 years ago, and it can be made from almost any fermentable item – such as wine, apples, pears, grapes, berries, beer and potatoes.
For over 2000 years, vinegar has been used to flavour and preserve foods, heal wounds and fight infections – as well as clean surfaces. There is some evidence that vinegar added to one’s diet will reduce the glucose response to a carbohydrate load both in healthy adults and in sufferers of diabetes. It has also been suggested that drinking a little vinegar each day is useful as a dietary aid because it imparts a feeling of fullness. Since I began working on this book I have been drinking two tablespoons of organic cider vinegar with a tiny squeeze of honey every morning. Who knows whether it’s doing me any good, but I am sure it won’t be doing me much harm either.
Both my sons are chefs in leading London restaurants and often use specialist vinegars for finishing dishes. Through them I have learned what a difference it can make and how to use it judiciously in my cooking.
It seemed natural that I should put my head together with that of my friend and former cookery editor colleague at Good Housekeeping, Emma Marsden, to come up with a book that combines my cleaning-with-vinegar expertise and her extensive culinary knowledge. Here is our – we hope – useful collection of tips, plus recipes that are, without exception, exciting, innovative and, importantly, straightforward. We hope you’ll enjoy them, together with beauty remedies and health hints – all using this humble yet important liquid in its many and various forms.
Aggie MacKenzie
The word vinegar comes from the French vin aigre, translated as sour wine, which accurately describes it. If you’ve ever left the dregs of an open bottle of wine for a few days and then attempted to drink the contents, only to be met with a sour taste, you’ve already started on the journey of vinegar-making. There are records of this magic ingredient being made as early as 5,000 BC in Babylon, and it’s thought that it was the result of a slipup while fermenting some wine. People cooking at that time experimented with this liquor, discovering that it could be used as both a condiment and ingredient.
Today it is a popular ingredient, produced commercially by either fast or slow fermentation. In fast fermentation, the liquid is oxygenated and the bacteria culture added. Slow fermentation is generally used for the production of specialised vinegars used in cooking; the culture of acetic acid bacteria grows on the surface of the liquid and fermentation evolves gradually over weeks or months and allows for the formation of a harmless slime made up of yeast and acetic acid bacteria, also known as the vinegar mother.
As history has already told, you can by all means leave a bottle of wine open – covered with a cloth that lets in air but not fruit flies – and eventually it will turn into vinegar. It may take months, though, so if you want to speed up the process and guarantee a result, here are a few pointers.
Firstly, vinegar is like sourdough and yogurt, in that it’s good to have some kind of starter to begin with. With sourdough it’s a leaven to add to flour and water; with yogurt it’s a couple of tablespoons of yogurt to add to milk that’s then heated. For vinegar, it’s some unpasteurised vinegar with the mother to start the process. These bottles are labelled clearly and you can buy them online and in supermarkets and delis.
Secondly, you need time. The mixture of wine and a vinegar mother won’t turn into vinegar overnight. You need a dark cupboard and the patience to wait for the mixture to ferment and the bacteria from the vinegar mother to turn the alcohol into acetic acid.
Thirdly, you need oxygen from the air, so use a wide-mouthed jar or ceramic pot and cover it with muslin or cheesecloth so the oxygen can get in but bugs can’t.
Whether you’re making wine or beer vinegar (see here), the basic recipe is much the same. Pour 400ml red wine or beer into a large open-mouthed jar (either ceramic or glass) then pour 200ml unpasteurised cider vinegar with the mother into the jar, too. Cover with a muslin or cheesecloth square and secure with a band. Label and store in a cool dark place for at least one month. It may take longer depending on conditions, but just keep tasting as you go. Some vinegar will naturally evaporate so, depending on how long it takes for the vinegar to brew, you’ll get around 400ml to use. You may find that a jelly-like substance forms in the liquid – don’t bin this, lift it out and transfer to another sterilised jar and use it to make another batch of vinegar with some of the unpasteurised liquor you’ve just fermented.
With such an array of vinegars available, it can be bewildering to know which to choose – you don’t want to use an expensive sherry vinegar to clean your windows, nor might you want to add a brash distilled malt to a casserole.
The most common vinegars produced in this country are malt (the brown stuff you put on fish and chips) and distilled malt (the clear type used in cleaning and food preserving).
With wine and sherry vinegars, the quality of the base alcohol used has a direct bearing on how good the vinegar will taste. A decent wine vinegar will be aged for a number of years in wooden