[Sca-cooks] 'take wine or vinegar', was: Cinnamon ...

[Craig Daniel]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Volker Bach <carlton_bach at yahoo.de> wrote:
>
>
> --- emilio szabo <emilio_szabo at yahoo.it> schrieb am Sa, 27.11.2010:
>
>
>> <<
>> The instruction 'take wine or vinegar' comes up
>> relatively frequently in North German recipes and
>> suggests that a) wine and vinegar belonged together
>> in upper-class cooking and b) what they considered
>> wine was not what we consider wine.>>
>>
>>
>> The two conclusions do not follow from the instruction, in
>> addition I think that
>> b) is false.
>
> Given how the wine was produced, aged and transported, I find it very hard to believe it had much in common with the sweetened,
> bottled product we have today.

I don't, given that no wine I've ever seen today is actually a
sweetened product (with the debatable exception of some fortified
wines, like cream sherry).

>>
>> The alternative wine/vinegar is current in humoral theory
>> and dietetics. The
>> choice of wine or vinegar depends on season in the first
>> place.
>
> Where would that substitution be justified? In my Tacuina, wine is invariably classed as warm and dry, whereas vinegar is usually
> categorised as cold and dry (though somehow at the same time warm, unsurprisingly). Seasonal variation would make sense, as is often

Yeah, that surprises me too and I'd love to hear more about it.

> done with vinegar and verjuice, but this is mentionen in none of the recipes I've found. Bock  recommends wine especially for older
> people while he warns against vinegar for phlegmatics, but that's not carried over into recipes universally. Certainly, the much-repeated
> recipe for vinegar-pickled fish never substitutes wine. I haven't studied it in detail, but it looks like the 'wine or vinegar' formula applies to
> cooking liquids.

The substitution is not going to be suggested for a pickled fish
recipe for reasons having nothing to do with humoral theory. Pickling
is a preservation method and requires the right chemistry to work at
all; wine doesn't have the requisite acidity, so you can't pickle fish
with it.

 - Jaume