4/6/2005. Vinegar porn

Open the doors of not only my pantry, but also the liquor cabinet, the linen closet, and the shelves in the spare bedroom, and you may conclude I am engaged in some sort of weird hocus-pocus. What am I doing with all those bottles of vinegar stashed away in every corner of the house--warding off evil spirits? Or is vinegar present in almost every room at the ready to perform some sort of household magic trick--à la Heloise (remember her?)--in case of a spill or accident?




But, no, look again and you'll see that plain old industrial white vinegar--the sort favored by housekeepers--is entirely absent from the bottles that seem to pop up all over the house like a crop of mushrooms after a summer rain. Even a cursory inspection will reveal their contents to be variously colored, from pale amber to claret red to deep, dark, nearly blackstrap and syrupy. Hardly what you'd whip out to treat a stain on our white sofa, for example.

In fact, all these bottles represent something very simple: a collector's obsession. I am completely unable to resist buying exotic vinegars--especially ones that I don't already possess. Far less noble and intellectual than Denis' obsession for art, mine nevertheless is rooted in a prosaic, personal reality, namely, that I love eating salad more than anything else. In fact, if I had to choose a single 'dish' to sustain me for the rest of my life, salad would be my answer. As it is, I consume enough leafy greens as a first course most evenings to sustain a Normandy milk cow.

I have to admit that sometimes, as I'm forking in my latest assortment of exotic, tangy, sharp, perhaps even bitter, greens and weeds, trying to tuck between my lips the odd stem protruding in bovine fashion from my mouth, that even less flattering analogies come to mind. As the corner of my eye detects Denis observing his American herbivore in her salad lust , I think I must resemble nothing so much as a moose chest-deep in greenery, with strands of succulent leaves trailing deliriously from masticating muzzle. Because when I have my face in a plate of ten different kinds of leaves that I just plucked from the garden, I too am in moose heaven.



But back to our story. All those vinegar bottles are part of my quest for the perfect vinaigrette with which to dress my salads. Because for me, a salad napped in some sort of mayonnaisey mixture isn't worthy of the name. Perfect garden greens and tiny succulent vegetables deserve nothing less than that mystical marriage of buttery, smoothly unctuous oils (finest olive, walnut, hazelnut...ah, but that is another story) in counterpoint to bright and tart or dark, complex, and sweet vinegars.




Just writing this is making my mouth water. So you can see it is no wonder that I require lots of vinegars to get my creative juices flowing when it comes to dressing my salads. Honey vinegar from Corsica, for instance, made from that jewel-like island's dark, wild-tasting honey from bees foraging in the maquis--honey that is like a tapestry woven from all the aromatic, resinous, fragrant flowering shrubs of this Mediterranean plant community. The vinegar has dark, mysterious base notes of the same complex perfume. One tiny taste--just a bee sip's worth--is enough to set me dreaming of the perfect salad to go with it: an assortment of small, wild plants--such as succulent pourpier d'hiver, peppery wild roquette leaves, flowery m”che, and the strappy leaves of staghorn plantain. A handful of amethyst-blue hyssop flowers. And for the oil? What could be more perfect than hazelnut oil, made from Corsica's wild nuts--with its rounded, roasty flavor full of the terroir of that magic isle?



Ironically, I'm not a fan of 'flavored' vinegars--those that have been infused with something, like an herb. I'm always a bit suspicious that the flavoring is an attempt to cover up the insipid taste of an inferior product. However, I do make some exceptions, such as white wine vinegar infused with cassis (black currant) and another one with myrthe, the berries of Myrtis communis, the fragrant shrub that is naturalized all over Corsica.

I'm more partial to vinegars made from the finest matériel primaire (usually wines) and carefully aged. I love to discern the character of the different wines the vinegars are made from. I have a big selection of different sherry vinegars from Spain. From Collioure, I brought back two different vinegars made from Banyuls, the special vin cuit of that region which is redolent of dried fruits. It is markedly softer than a red wine vinegar, yet without the characteristic aroma of a sherry. Of course, there are also Champagne, red, and white wine vinegars--all exceedingly variable according to their provenance.

My favorite red wine vinegar is actually my own, made in a vinaigrier that I keep near the fireplace in Normandy, feeding it with red wine leftovers throughout the year. It is much darker and more flavorful than a grocery-store-type red wine vinegar, which is made from the poorest excuse for red wine in an industrial process and then diluted to a standard acidity. Home-made wine vinegar is a living entity--like yogurt. If you peek into the secret belly of my vinaigrier you'll see what I mean: a whitish slimy film of acetic acid bacteria floating on the surface, busily converting alcohol into acetic acid. This is the mysterious--and surprisingly mercurial--vinegar mother.




A couple of my favorite vinegars aren't made from wine at all, but from directly fermented fruit--muscat grapes for one and figs for the other. Each has a balsamic-like, sweet syrupy character--but remarkably imbued with the perfume of the parent fruit. Perfect for a salad of slivered fennel, red onions, and dried figs, for instance. Mmmmm.

For Asian-inspired salads and dipping sauces, there are of course rice wine vinegar, and Chinese black vinegar. I must confess that the latter is a bottle that grows quite dusty in my larder. Someone once suggested to me that it makes a great and cheap substitute for balsamic vinegar. I just bit my tongue. Only someone with a dead tongue could come to such a conclusion. For African and south sea island type inspirations, I have coconut vinegar and mango vinegar from Burkhina Faso.



Of course, at the end of a long day, I'm just as likely as anyone else to fall back on a vinaigrette of habit. For me, this is always a balsamic/olive oil combination, seasoned simply with plenty of chopped shallot, fleur de sele sea salt, and freshly ground pepper. I never scrimp on the quality of my balsamic vinegar and olive oil. My every day balsamic is very expensive, syrupy and sticky and concentrated, of the grade Tradizionale which indicates it has been aged for at least 12 years. It is so good that I always wipe the lip of the bottle clean with my finger after pouring...and lick my finger, which is why the bottle may look smudgy in the photo.



As good as my 'everyday' balsamic is, I have another bottle that is--ostensibly--even better. I say this because I have yet to open it. When Denis and I passed through Modena early in the winter, of course I had to buy a bottle of the best the home of balsamic vinegar has to offer. The bottle lives in the beautiful, jewel-case box it came in (main photo at head of article). When I bought it, the clerk reverently wrapped it in gift paper and tied it with a beautiful green and silver cord. This was balsamic vinegar of the tradizionale, extra vecchio, aged for a minimum of 25 years! Can you imagine?

Inside the box, to my delight, I discovered a booklet explaining in five languages how this queen of vinegars is made. Balsamic is not a wine vinegar; it is made from the directly fermented juice of grapes. But not just any grapes, of course. Real balsamic vinegar begins with Trebbiano grapes--an extremely sugary white grape that grows on the slopes around Castelvetro. These grapes are harvested as late in the season as possible for maximal sugar content, then crushed and the must run off as if for wine into vats.

At the first hint of fermentation, the must is removed from the vats before the sugar can be transformed to alcohol, filtered,and run into a boiling vat where it is heated slowly over a fire and simmered gently to a concentration of from 30 to 70%.



Now begins the complicated part of the process. The cooked must is now filtered again and fed into the largest of a series of 5 aging casks called the "set". However, this cask already contains some previously started vinegar, therefore this process is called "topping up." In this series, each cask is smaller than the preceding one. But most fascinating, each is made of a different wood, beginning with oak for the first and largest, and progressing through chestnut, cherrywood, ash, and mulberry! At the end of the series, a small amount of finished vinegar is decanted off and bottled, but some remains in the cask to participate in the topping off process, mixing in with the newly aged must added from the next batch. If it sounds complicated, it is, but I hope you get the fascinating picture.

My delightful balsamic booklet ends with a few words from Pavarotti--native of Modena--and a recipe of his for veal with...you guessed it. This is balsamic vinegar that is so precious and concentrated that it should be used as a seasoning just in drop-measure, right before serving a dish. The problem is I haven't yet figured out just what dish is grand enough to crack the seal on this royal bottle. I'm admittedly not a fan of veal...so, I'll just have to wait for inspiration to strike. In the meantime, I'll have to go on behaving like a teenage boy with a new girlie magazine under his bed. When no one else is around, I take out the jewel box from time to time, and open it to admire the curvy bottle with its even more voluptuous contents...still waiting to be savored.

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