Name: White Gooseberry Vinegar
Ingredients: lightly colored ripe gooseberries; 2 gallons water; 1 lb loaf sugar; 1 tablespoon fresh barm or yeast; 1 tablespoon treacle

White Gooseberry Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Mash the gooseberries well using a large mallet or potato masher.
Combine the mashed fruit with 2 gallons of water.
Stir for one hour.

Ferment

Let the mixture ferment for three weeks.
Stir daily.
Strain the liquid.
Add 1 lb of loaf sugar, 1 tablespoon of fresh barm or yeast, and 1 tablespoon of treacle for every gallon.
Allow it to work for at least three days.

Barrel and bottle

Transfer the mixture into a suitable barrel.
Seal it for twelve months.
After a year, bottle the vinegar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries: Provide the fruit sugars, acidity and flavour that the fermentation works on.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast, which converts it into alcohol for the vinegar to form from.
Fresh barm or yeast: Starts the fermentation that turns the sweet liquid into alcohol.
Treacle: Adds extra sugar to feed the fermentation and a darker, richer flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.