I cannot make a salad without thinking of a dear friend no longer with us, Tom Aidala, a wild Sicilian architect who lived in my apartment building in North Beach, who once, back in my San Francisco days, gave me something more precious than gold — my vinegar starter. A vinegar mother is that strange, scummy, almost leathery dark substance that forms on the surface of wine gone bad, then turns ordinary wine into an elixir not often found in commercial bottles. Mine happens to be over 175 years old, having belonged originally to Tom’s Sicilian nonna and who knows who before that. I’ve tasted nothing like it since.
Is making vinegar like using a hammer whose grip wears out and so you put the old head on the new grip and then the head gets old and you put a new head on the old grip? But I’d rather not ponder that puzzle and, anyway, I’m certainly not going to apply that philosophy to my vinegar-making, as we are as addicted to our Sicilian potion as one could get to a great Amarone. Or dark chocolate. Or white truffles.
It smells yeasty and nutty, and has the clarity of fine old wine. I use it in my salads, with only oil and salt.
My ruby-red mother resides in three large glass jars in the cool air of a wine area we discovered as we rebuilt a house in a tiny village in France, cooled by a wall of local schist rock. From these jars, every three or four weeks, I fill vinegar give-away bottles, adding to my mother the undrunk wine we sometimes have after a dinner party or simply from buying mistakes.
However, leftover wine is pretty much an oxymoron around this house, so my vinegar takes a bit longer than most to mature as it waits for its daily or weekly or monthly feeding.
There are some pretty heavy wines, however, in my vinegar, such as the 1961 Lafitte which was stored improperly and, sad to say, went straight past our gullets and into the jar, not to mention several questionable auction acquisitions of old burgundy that we should have known better than to bid upon.
Still, my vinegar has benefited greatly from these unwise purchases; it smells yeasty and nutty, and has the clarity of fine old wine. I use it in my salads, with only oil and salt, and friends ask, “What on earth is that heavenly dressing?”
“It’s just my mother,” I say.
I am so spoiled after having used homemade vinegar for almost 50 years that I cannot bring myself to use the thin commercial ones, even in a pinch. A lemon will suffice and is often better than the bottled versions.
When we left LA and moved to Europe, I left my precious stash of vinegar and mother with a dear friend who swore it would survive in her cool garage. Returning to pack up and send our furnishings to Italy, I remembered that I had entrusted my ‘mama’ to my friend, and with some difficulty crammed a large piece of it into an air-tight bottle to travel in my purse on our new adventure! Thank heavens it was before the age of no liquids on planes, but I did run into a baggage checker who wanted to know what in the heck I had in the bottle.
“It looks like the creature from the black lagoon,” he said. I pulled off a little piece for him to start his family. You never know who you’ll meet at baggage check, and as it turned out, he had worked in a restaurant some years and loved to cook. I love thinking about how his vinegar future is unfolding.
If you have a friend who has some mother, or a friend of a friend who has some mother, take a clean wine bottle with you and some homemade cookies or focaccia to barter with and go ask for a bit of what looks like someone’s very disturbed liver.
Pour half a bottle of old wine into a large, glass container along with the mother, stir it well to aerate it, and wait a month or so until the smell drives you wild.
When you sniff your mother/vinegar and it smells round and rich, like roasting nuts or a good old wine ready to sip, simply pour a little through a sieve into a clean glass bottle.
I use only French, Italian, and sometimes Spanish wines, but that’s just my preference, as California wines, readily available when I started vinegaring, often have more sulfites than my choices. And in the old days, I am told, serious vinegar-makers spit into their mothers, but I think I’ll let that one pass.
When I am in Rome, where I keep a large balloon-shaped ghirba under the sink, I’m happy to part with small portions of my growing mother, as it really does not take much to start up the recycling of old wines. The payoff is a vinegar that you will never ever find on the shelves of fancy food shops.
When you sniff your mother/vinegar and it smells round and rich, like roasting nuts or a good old wine ready to sip, simply pour a little through a sieve into a clean glass bottle for use and continue adding old undrinkable red wine to your major container. It will help to use two bottles of mother as one will always be turning into vinegar and the other will be ready for salads, recipes, stopping a cold, or at least ready to give away.
After all, everyone needs mothering now and then.
