Cookbook Preview: Canal House authors take a seasonal approach to cooking with homemade vinegar

Melissa Hamilton is a renowned food stylist who worked at Saveur as a test kitchen director and food editor. Christopher Hirscheimer is an award-winning photographer and a founder of Saveur. Together the women founded Canal House, a studio, workshop, dining room, office and kitchen they work from.

“Canal House Cooks Every Day” ($45) takes a seasonal look at everyday home cooking that has been featured in O, Bon Appetit and The New York Times.

This excerpt is from the March chapter:

“A few years ago while visiting a friend we noticed a wide pretty crock covered with a gauzy linen cloth on her kitchen counter. Intrigued, we inquired about it. ‘Oh, I am making vinegar. A friend gave me a piece of mother allegedly grown from the original mother that Paula Wolfert brought back from France in the 1970s. (This story did not turn out to be totally accurate, but we like to believe it anyway — it makes the vinegar taste better.) Want a piece to start making your own?’ Well, of course we did.

“Good ordinary red-wine vinegar is hard to find. The kind sold in grocery stores is harsh and too acidic. Specialty food stores have fancy balsamicos and flavored vinegars, but often there is no unflavored red-wine variety to be found — guess it’s not sexy enough. So we decided to make our own, for the fun and satisfaction of it, and because we love its sparkling bright, fresh flavor.

“Our friend fished out the gelatinous vinegar mother from the crock, cut off a piece, and put it in a jar with a splash of wine mixed with water — and we were on our way. The ‘sainted mother’ came with three pages of instructions, including cautionary advice: Don’t swamp the mother when feeding it, or it will die! If your vinegar smells like furniture polish, throw it away! But we are more intuitive than technical. So we approached vinegar-making our way. And boiled down the instructions to this:

“Beg, borrow, steal, or buy a piece of mother. Put it in a clean 1-gallon crock, glass or plastic container with a wide mouth. Add a bottle of good red wine and 2 cups of water. Drape a double-layered piece of cheesecloth over the top and secure it with a big rubber band to keep out dirt and bugs and let in air. Stash it in a quiet, cool, dark corner. Then over the next two months feed every now and then with leftover red wine — we’ve even used white wine. Take care to gently push the mother aside as you pour in the wine. After about three months of feeding and tending, it should taste like vinegar. Then you can strain it and either pasteurize it, which will keep the mother from growing, or pour it into clean bottles and allow it to age and mellow.

“We honored our responsibility and began to leave at least a glass of wine in every bottle to share with the vinegar. Once when we’d forgotten to feed ‘poor mother,’ we poured a bottle of 2007 Meredith Estate Pinot Noir in to make up. And we were forgiven; the vinegar kept coming. Since most things are about the same big thing, we try to learn lessons from everything. Making vinegar reminds us of friendship — you pay attention to what it needs and take care of it, and it grows and transforms into something beautiful.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Cookbook Preview: Canal House authors take a seasonal approach to cooking with homemade vinegar."