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

[Volker Bach]

--- Craig Daniel <teucer at pobox.com> schrieb am Sa, 27.11.2010:


> > 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).

German wines routinely have sufgar content 'controlled' at the must stage, and that still involved sweetening, though not as much as it used to, given the fashion is returning to dry, light wines nowadays. It's quite normal with most wines labelled 'lieblich' (sweet) in many years. Even in good areas, we don't have the weather for sweet wines most of the time.
 
> >>

> > 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.

Very likely, though therecipe doesn't state it's intended for preservation. It's basically about serving fish soaked in vinegar. I'm not sure where it comes from, and it may simply be something people did rather than something physicians thought they should do. But from what I've seen, the preservation aspect doesn't come up until later, or at least isn't mentioned.