[Sca-cooks] Sekanjabin Origins now vinegar

[Stephen Bloch]

Elewyiss wrote:
>>I don't suppose  you know of a period cookbook with an actual recipe for
>>vinegar? I'm still having trouble documenting it.

to which Elizabeth or David replied:
>You want a recipe for vinegar? Vinegar normally shows up as an ingredient.

Channeling the author (Douglas Adams?) who said "flying is the art of 
falling on the ground and missing," vinegar is basically failed wine; 
literally "vin aigre", or sour wine.  More precisely, wine is 
normally fermented in the presence of very little oxygen, so the 
yeast is forced into its anaerobic metabolic mode, which produces 
alcohol as a waste product; in the presence of oxygen, the yeast 
prefers a more efficient aerobic metabolic mode that produces acetic 
acid instead.

Does that sound right?  (I'm not a brewer....)

Anyway, I suspect that every human society that's ever made a 
fermented beverage has had a corresponding vinegar.
-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu