Skip to main content
Drink

Sugar Vinegar

A fermented sugar solution made by boiling water and sugar, cooling, adding yeast, and aging for six months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Sugar Vinegar

Sugar Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sugar syrup

  1. Boil 1 gallon of water with 2 pounds of coarse sugar and skim thoroughly.

  2. Add 1 quart of cold water to the hot mixture.

Ferment

  1. When cool, spread yeast on toast and add it to the mixture.

  2. Stir the mixture for nine days.

  3. Transfer to a barrel and place it in a sunny spot, covering the bung-hole with a piece of slate.

  4. Make this in March; it will be ready in six months.

  5. When sufficiently sour, bottle it or use it directly from the cask with a wooden spigot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Coarse sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into acids and alcohol, producing the sour flavour.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that slowly turns the sweet liquid sour.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast only when the mixture has cooled. Yeast is killed or weakened by hot liquid, so it must be added once the syrup has cooled enough to keep it alive and fermenting.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes