Somebody printed a vinegar recipe in a national medical register.
That’s the real page. The Paris faculty of medicine kept an official book of every preparation a pharmacist was allowed to make, and in 1748 one of those entries was a jar of herbs sitting in vinegar. We didn’t take anyone’s word for what it said. We went and read it, and what we wanted to know was how close it is to what we make.
The title has a nickname in it.
The Latin means prophylactic vinegar, and then the book does something odd for an official register. It adds what people actually called the stuff: the vinegar of the four thieves. There’s a story attached about robbers who stripped plague houses and never got sick, and it’s a very good story, and nobody has ever found the thieves. They may never have existed at all. A French pharmacy historian spent more than forty years looking for a name, a trial, a record of any kind, and came back with nothing, which is roughly where the matter has rested ever since. So we’re leaving the thieves where the book leaves them, in the nickname, and paying attention to the recipe instead.
Thirteen plants, weighed out to the drachm.
Here’s the whole thing as it’s printed. The quantities are apothecary measures, which is why they sound like a spell, and the Latin is just the Latin. What strikes us is how ordinary most of it is: rosemary, sage, mint, lavender, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and garlic are all things you could pull out of a reasonably well stocked cupboard this afternoon without anybody thinking twice about it. Eight of the thirteen are that dull.
- 01Absinthii majorisGreater wormwoodan ounce and a half
- 02Absinthii minorisRoman wormwoodan ounce and a half
- 03RorismariniRosemaryan ounce and a half
- 04SalviæSagean ounce and a half
- 05MenthæMintan ounce and a half
- 06RutæRuean ounce and a half
- 07Florum Lavandulæ siccatorumDried lavender flowerstwo ounces
- 08AlliiGarlictwo drachms
- 09Calami AromaticiSweet flagtwo drachms
- 10CinnamomiCinnamontwo drachms
- 11CaryophyllorumClovestwo drachms
- 12Nucis MoschatæNutmegtwo drachms
- 13CamphoræCamphorhalf an ounce, dissolved in spirit of wine
- 14Aceti optimiThe best vinegareight pounds
Twelve days in the sun.
Macera calore Solis vel igne arenæ in matracio rite obturato per duodecim dies. Cola. Exprime fortiter, & filtra.
Steep it in the heat of the sun, or on a sand fire, in a properly stoppered flask, for twelve days. Strain it. Press it hard, and filter it.
The method line is the part we didn’t expect. Every summary of this recipe we could find says ten to fifteen days, and the 1748 page says twelve, in the heat of the sun, in a flask you’ve stoppered properly. That is startlingly close to what the two of us do in a Brantford kitchen, except we steep for weeks rather than days and there is no sun involved. This is Ontario.
Then it was struck out.
The entry didn’t last. Somewhere in the nineteenth century the French pharmacopoeia dropped it, and the recipe went back to being a thing people made at home rather than something a pharmacist could sell you. Three of the thirteen are the reason a modern kitchen won’t touch the original.
Five of them are still here.
We didn’t set out to rebuild a 1748 recipe and we haven’t. We started from fire cider, which is its own thing with its own much shorter history, and worked on it until the shot stopped tasting like a punishment. But when you lay our ingredient lists next to that page, five plants appear on both, and so does the vinegar, and so does the habit of leaving the jar alone for a long time.
One note on the pictures. The 1887 atlas these engravings come from has no plate for garlic, so the garlic here is borrowed from a different book of the same vintage, Bentley and Trimen’s Medicinal Plants of 1880. It seemed worth telling you rather than hoping nobody looked.
What we’re actually claiming.
We’re claiming nothing beyond what’s in the bottle. We won’t tell you this vinegar does what a 1748 pharmacist thought it did, and we’d be lying if we tried, because we don’t know what it does for anybody. What we can tell you is that people have been putting sharp plants in vinegar and waiting for a very long time, that the practice is old enough to have been official once, and that ours tastes good enough to drink on purpose.
See the three blends