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Gooseberry Vinegar

A fermented vinegar made from gooseberries, sugar, yeast, and spring water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Gooseberry Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Boil the spring water and let it cool.

  2. In a large tub, combine the cooled water with the bruised gooseberries.

  3. Let the mixture sit for 60 hours, stirring often.

  4. Strain the mixture through a hair bag.

Ferment

  1. Add 1 pound of coarse sugar for each gallon of liquid.

  2. Transfer the liquid into a barrel and add a toast spread with yeast.

  3. Cover the bung-hole with a piece of slate and place the barrel in the sun.

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 acids and flavour that give the vinegar its character.
Coarse sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol that the vinegar bacteria then convert to acid.
Yeast
Starts the alcoholic fermentation of the sugars in the gooseberry liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar per gallon of liquid. Sugar must be measured against the actual volume of liquid, since yeast needs enough sugar to produce alcohol. Too little yields a weak vinegar, while the fermentation depends on this balance to proceed properly.

“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.

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