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American Vinegar

A homemade vinegar made by boiling water, adding molasses, yeast, and fermenting for months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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American Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Boil 6 gallons of water.

  2. Add 4 quarts of molasses while the water is hot.

  3. Cool the mixture in a tub until it is milk-warm.

  4. Stir in 1 pint of fresh yeast.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Transfer the mixture to a cask and set it by the fire for 24 hours.

  2. Place the cask in the sun with a bottle in the bung hole.

  3. Bottle the vinegar 3 months later.

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

Molasses
Provides sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, which then becomes acetic acid.
Fresh yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the sweet liquid into alcohol.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture until it is milk-warm before adding the yeast. Yeast works best at moderate warmth. If the liquid is still too hot, it can kill the yeast and stop fermentation, while a cool liquid will ferment slowly.

“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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