SC - Vinegar

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

And it came to pass on  1 Feb 98, that Anne-Marie Rousseau wrote:

> Here's a thought...what types of vinegar do you think go with
> English food, vs French food, vs the Eastern corpus? Or German? or
> Spanish?
> 
> Chiquart specifies red wine vinegar in his shopping lists. Is this
> because being Savoiard, this is the type he could get? Would an
> English cook use malt vinegar, ie fermenting the easier to get beer,
> rather than the imported wine? 

Anne Wilson in _Food and Drink in Britain_ says that wine was 
produced locally in medieval times.  The Domesday Book records 40 
vineyards in southern England.  The vineyard at the monastary at Ely 
produced so much verjuice that the excess had to be sold off.  When 
cheap and plentiful wine from Gascony in France began to be imported 
during the reign of Henry II, the English wine industry started to 
decline.  The Wars of the Roses aggravated the situation, 
as did the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, since so 
many of the vineyards were attached to religious houses.

"Vinegar" made from beer is more properly called alegar.  Wilson 
feels that it may have been introduced as early as Roman times.  
Around the 17th century, alegar began to take the place of verjuice 
in pickles and sauces, and began to usurp the name "vinegar", 
previously only applied to wine-based products.  Although
other kinds of vinegar were still made, malt vingegar became the most 
common.

So it looks to me as though both wine vinegar and malt vingegar would 
be appropriate for period British cooking.

 
Lady Brighid ni Chiarain of Tethba
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom
mka Robin Carroll-Mann *** harper @ idt.net
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