Vinegar Cookery and Sour Braising

The reigning monarch of all our flavored vinegars is raspberry vinegar. Its use was so much a part of Pennsylvania Dutch cookery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that virtually all the cookbooks printed in our part of the country contain recipes for this preparation. Raspberry vinegar was used in sauces for meats like smoked tongue, in salad dressings, in marinades, even in pickles. When mixed with sugar and mineral water, raspberry vinegar was also a popular summer drink.

The popularity of fruit-flavored vinegars is doubtless an extension of the Pennsylvania Dutch preference for sweet-sour combinations in cookery: the interplay of fruit and meat, the counterpoint of tastes like quince and honey, and the use of black vinegars for sauces. Black vinegars are old, barrel-aged vinegars that become excessively sharp and what we call smoky in reference to the oak taste. Black vinegars are seldom used alone, except perhaps in mincemeat pies. Rather, they are reduced through hard boiling to a semi-syrup with dried fruit, raisins, brown sugar, molasses, or a combination of any of these.