The rise of vinegar: from staple to status symbol

Out goes balsamic, in come flavoured vinegars and even making your own, all a side effect of fermentation being the infatuation of the culinary nation

Vinegar used to be such a straightforward thing: a condiment so modest, you barely knew it was in the house. It came, when I was growing up, in two forms. There was malt, which was always Sarson’s (glass bottle, maroon label); and there was wine (most of which, in our house, was red and had been transported in semi-industrial quantities from France at the end of the summer holidays). The emergence of the former from the pantry signalled the treat that was fish and chips, though my mother occasionally used it for cleaning, too (finding me heartbroken after some stupid love affair, she once set about scrubbing all my filthy windows with vinegar, hot water and scrunched newspapers, a move she correctly surmised would instantly cheer me up). The latter was only ever used in salad dressing, and a favourite sweet and sour pork dish, the recipe for which came from a 70s Cordon Bleu magazine (I hope it will not seem like boasting if I tell you that my mum had all 72 in the series, and the binders).

In the 80s, balsamic vinegar arrived, though it reached the provinces only slowly; it was the 90s before I caught sight of it, splashed in all its shiny brownness across a dish of mozzarella at an establishment (Wiz? Woz?) then run by Antony Worrall Thompson (I was by then in London). Delia Smith briefly went mad for it, as a result of which there was wild talk in some quarters of adding a hint of it to strawberries, the better to bring out their sweetness. But pretty soon we all went off it anyway; too much of it was factory produced, and tasted of nothing but sugar (the good stuff, from Modena, ferments and acidifies for a year, after which it sets off on a long – 12 months at a minimum – journey to maturity in a series of barrels, each one of which is smaller than the last and, ideally, made from a different kind of wood). People seem to feel about balsamic vinegar now as they do about Camp coffee or mushroom ketchup: the bottle stays on the cupboard shelf only on the grounds that it just might one day be useful – though God knows when or why.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2A9l955