The mother of all vinegars

At the country house in Normandie yesterday, I pulled out a bottle of vinegar that I hadn't used in a long time. Pouring some of it into a spoon, I noticed something that made my throat catch in excitement: in the belly of the spoon floated a small, thready...blob. Holding my breath, I held the bottle against the light. YES! In the murky depths, I could discern a larger, more luxurious blob, pulsating voluptuously from the motion of my hand as I'd raised the bottle.

Whoa now, you're saying. So your vinegar's spoiled. And you're excited? I mean, isn't a blob in your vinegar rather disgusting?

Well, maybe. I'll admit that if you accidentally slurped down the blob on your salad, that could be a little unnerving. But not for the reasons you think! It would be a terrible thing because you would have just slurped down the elusive vinegar mother!

A vinegar mother is the culture of live acetic-acid-producing bacteria that is responsible for turning wine into wine vinegar, or cider into cider vinegar, or sherry into sherry vinegar. Because vinegar is sterilized before being offered for sale, the appearance of a mother is a rare and chance event, most likely due to chance "contamination" of an open bottle of vinegar with a helpful acetic acid bacterium that was floating around in your kitchen at an opportune moment. Having fallen by magnificent chance into your bottle of vinegar, it finds itself in an environment hospitable only to itself and is able to multiply into a glorious...blob.

The only other time in my life that I was blessed with appearance of a vinegar mother, I was unfortunately stranded in the United States with no hope of finding a vinaigrier--a special ceramic barrel used to ferment vinegar at home--that is still a fixture of many country French homes.

But this time, my vinegar mother hit the jackpot! I have, in fact, two different vinaigriers waiting to give my mother a cozy home. (I've generously made both of them available to you, my happy readers and hopefully shoppers, so that you too may be prepared for the lucky appearance of a vinegar mother.) As I told Denis, we could theoretically have four different vinaigriers going for all 4 kinds of vinegar: red wine, white wine, cider, and sherry. He just rolled his eyes.

With a degree in microbiology and a passion for cooking, I have long been fascinated by all culinary fermentations. Back in the day, as my son would say, I even had a Jersey cow and made all sorts of cheese. And I may, in fact, be the only American who ever moved to France with a jar of sourdough starter in her luggage.

But because the vinegar mother cannot be easily home-cultured unless you are blessed by chance, and is not to my knowledge commercially available, I've never yet had the chance to ferment my own vinegars. Not, as you may have gathered, that I haven't wanted to.

In the kitchen equipment section Richard Olney's unassumingly magnificent cookbook, Simple French Food, he devotes no less than 5 pages to the home production of vinegar. According to Olney--and he is sure to be right--the submerged mother--such as mine--is inactive. It must be induced to bloom across the surface of the wine in a healthy white scum, the fleur blanche, for the acetic acid bacterium is in fact aerobic, requiring air to conduct its fermenting activities. He goes on to describe how wine must added without disturbing the delicate white mother floating on the surface.

Well, a dormant mother is better than no mother. I'm optimistic, and plan to quizz my caviste (wine merchant) this week about the best Bordeaux to start a vinaigrier going. He'll probably think I'm nuts. Then, next weekend, we'll have the ritual hanging of the vinaigrier on the warm wall next to the fireplace. With a bit of luck, I'll be able to coax my vinegar mother to life. I'll start with Bordeaux. If it works, though, this could become the mother of all vinegars...cider, sherry...

For your own vinaigrier, go to http://www.frenchgardening.com/item.tmpl?SKU=ACCU8

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