Summer, bottled

Red? Scarlet? Rose? Pink? 

Today, in the luxury of 78° air-conditioning (Central Park recorded 101°F), I strained and bottled two different batches of common milkweed flower vinegar. It is hard to describe, but it helps if you have smelled the heavy, lilac umbels of Asclepias syriaca. Wildly fruity-flowery and bracingly acidic on the edges of the tongue. Also a honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and elderflower vinegar, where the soft fragrance of the honeysuckle still lingers. I gathered the flowers in early June.

The vinegars began in large jars, the flowers mixed with sugar and tap water, stirred and allowed to fizz (these methods are in Forage, Harvest, Feast). At this point they are what I call cordials - sweetly concentrated, and naturally effervescent thanks to the wild yeasts at work. I serve them on picnics, diluted with tonic or chilled seltzer. Or booze, more rarely.

But because I sip and cook with vinegar more often than I drink sweet things, I decided to let them all ferment (much) longer, until acetic acid bacteria had produced the sourness that tells you vinegar has arrived. 

They are nothing like a commercial white wine vinegar, for example. There is acid, yes (their pH hovers around 4 - commercial vinegar may be 2 or 3), but also many layers of fragrance and sweetness and a sense of very ripe fruit. They are quintessential sipping vinegars, more like shrubs, made for quaffing on heat-blasted days like today: a tall glass, filled one quarter with the wild vinegar, ice cubes, and then water. Swirl. Quaff.

To the right (in the image above) is the black currant gin that has been steeping since last Saturday, when I pounced on the first - and not cheap - black currants at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. I'm going to use the leftover fruit, still packed with that musky, tart flavor, to make my favorite jam. 

There they are, from the other side. True color. Left to right: black currant gin x 3, the common milkweed vinegars x 6, and the honeysuckle-rose-elderflower. Times four.

Don Kirkwood gave me the bottle with my name etched on its side. I joked that one day his bottles and upcycled lab jars (more etching) would tell me who I was, one day. Maybe they will. I don't know where he found the time to do this. He was a kind, kind man. 

So there it is. Summer, its flowers gathered, their scents and flavors captured, and the sticky, intense heat reminding me of the time we lost Don, in his springtime in the mountains outside Cape Town, hunting for a flower that likes cliffs. Almost a year ago. 

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Forage, Harvest, Feast