Oswyn's Musings

As Pennsic approaches, it is time to put up or shut up.

After a long conversation with Gunnar and Lucretia, I have a plan. I have registered to be at the A&S display on Sunday, August 7 with the poster, barrels, wheelbarrow, and vinegars. I have been encouraged to bring as much “special” vinegar as I can.

Then on Monday afternoon, I will wheel the barrow throughout Pennsic, visiting the Royal Encampments but then anyone and everyone else. I will be “hocking” my vinegar. I cannot legally sell it and none of you have ha’pennies anyway 🙂 I will have 40L of barrel-aged Pinot Noir vinegar. That should be plenty. Please (and Gertie begs you) take some. Marinate your meats in it, make dressings, make shrubs, whatever.

Hopefully, Gunnar and others will be able to take photos and video of the experience. The idea is to show how vinegar was sold in late period. I will have handouts as well to help explain what is going on. I am going to try to be in character but that doesn’t always go over well in the SCA.

Now for the question that is in my mind: why the heck am I doing this? I don’t know, really. The SCA wants to recreate the medieval period, at least the “good” parts. Once I found the woodcut showing a vinegar merchant, I wanted to do this. I wanted to make for a brief period that specific experience happen again. And our tent city of Pennsic feels like the perfect place for it.

See you there.

So I have gotten a lot of new readers to this blog, or at least more vocal ones  I don’t know if I ever stated what I am actually doing in SCA A&S, you know, the actual why I am doing. It might be buried in earlier posts. Either way, it is worth restating as I might have changed scope since then.

I also want to preface that in no way is the following a direct result of my conversations over the past weekend (10-16-21) and further. Those conversations got me thinking about this topic, but it is not a result or rebuttal of those conversations.

First some history on how I got to vinegars and sprinkled throughout that will be what I am doing and why I am doing it. I will try to wrap up with some more direct statements on both of those questions.

I got started in the SCA just before my house caught fire and burned to the frame. I mentioned that often before. It was shortly after that I attended one of my first events, the combined RUM/Aethelmearc event in Cleveland. It was there that I met a person who would become my best friend, Verena Entenwirth but we didn’t know that yet. Having just a rental property and not sure when I would have a house again, I looked around for some thing I could do. I took two classes from her on making cordials. I figured, “yeah I can do that.” So I tried my hand at it.

I have many scores of different cordials. After a while of making cordials, I decided I would try my hand at teaching. I had wanted to be a historian and probably a teacher but I was dissuaded from that path. The SCA gave me the chance to indulge in it. So I started teaching on how to make cordials. It wasn’t long though that I thought tasting and experimentation would be a good idea. After all, the teaching of making a cordial is easy and quick. I can teach that in 5 minutes. But doing an experiment and teaching you the results? That can go on as long as we are both willing to sample.

My first class on this was taking the same strawberry cordial and varying the liquor. Getting people to taste what the difference is between using a vodka, using a rum, using a gin, and using a brandy. My next class was taking that strawberry cordial in vodka and changing the sugar used. I am not sure I knew exactly what I was doing at that point. I mean, what I was trying to show. But the seed was there. I wanted people to think about what they chose to use and by doing such a basic experiment, give them I place to start from. While I was a good cordial maker, many others were better. And cordials are barely period. There are some notable ones that we know of but recreational distilled spirits wasn’t a huge thing yet.

It was also around this time that I was told I was not a brewer. Whether true or not, I felt it was true. Cordial making isn’t brewing. I moved on to try my hand at something else. There were many Norse and pseudo-Norse people wanting and making mead. I made a few meads. Again, I was okay. I am still only okay at it. But one of the things I noticed is that the go-to honey is basically whatever you could get cheap. 5 pounds of honey can be very expensive so it makes sense to go cheap but I wanted to experiment again. I made the same basic straight mead but varied the source of honey.

I started understanding what I wanted people to do, what I was trying to show people. Here is this generic thing, honey, that was actually very specific depending on where your persona was from. The people were likely to use local honey (though trade is always possible). In Kent, that might be an apple honey. In Sicily, that might be an almond honey. In Greece, that might be a pine honey. Each place was going to have a different honey and that same mead recipe was going taste very different.

After that, I wanted to branch out into something else, something most people weren’t doing. I had small quantities of alcohol around and nothing to do with them. I couldn’t give a person 1 oz of a cordial as a gift for instance. And after running the Drunken Duck with Verena a few times, there was a need for a home-brewed, non-alcoholic drink. I decided one of the things missing was vinegar. With vinegar, it was another generic term that people weren’t thinking about. It was an important thing in medieval life that we weren’t exploring. It was something I could make with alcohol that others weren’t doing. I started looking into this.

By this time, I knew what I was really doing. I wanted SCA cooks (and everyone else) to stop thinking about vinegar in generic terms. Most recipes that call for vinegar will just say vinegar. Some modern ones will realize that there are choices and say red wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar. I wanted people to go deeper. That Italian recipe that calls for vinegar isn’t asking for the same stuff as that English recipe calling for vinegar. I started making vinegar and I invited people to taste. The Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir vinegars are very different. All are “red wine vinegars.” The same can be said for any flavor of vinegar; each base alcohol yields a different flavor of vinegar.

It is not reasonable to expect SCA cooks on a tight budget to hunt down specific vinegars though. The modern vinegar industry makes a batch of cheap vinegar that is artificially flavored and a bunch of small-scale craft vinegar that is expensive. But I can fill that role. I can make a bunch of different vinegars, using medieval-like processes, and give them to the cooks to use. It satisfied my need to give back and be interdependent. A more authentic vinegar meant a more authentic feast and a more authentic experience.

In learning to make vinegars, one invariably runs across what is known in the history of vinegar. That vinegar was historical was well known; civilization had vinegar as soon as it had alcohol. And nature had it much sooner  But learning the history wasn’t the passion. It wasn’t long after I would display my vinegars that I would get questions. Is Balsamic vinegar period? Did such and such a society have this vinegar? Have you heard about the 4 Thieves Vinegar? What are the health benefits of vinegar?

For the most part, I don’t care about those questions. I know, that is a horrible thing to say. It is probably one of the reasons some question my research. I found the answers to bolster my ability to show I know what I am doing. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of people who have asked me historical questions about vinegar have never tasted any of my vinegars. We are definitely after different things. They have a historical question. I want them to experience that this generic stuff is more expansive than they think. In some ways, it is the difference between pure science and engineering. They want an answer; I want a solution. I am much more interested in knowing how to fix a process problem with making my vinegar than the answer to whether such a thing was really done in period.

After a while I did come to understand that vinegar is not sexy. It takes a pretty rare person to care about whether the mother is floating or to admire the color and odor of a vinegar. I was such a person but outside of a few, not many were. I did start looking at what are the special vinegars and how did people make them. The two European based ones are both barrel processes. Okay, I can do that then. I started just barrel aging some of my vinegars. That was pretty good. I was asked, “are there any period recipes you could do?” I looked. All of the recipes for vinegar I found were infusions. In making cordials, I had already done lots of those. But I wasn’t trying to show I could add herbs and spices to a vinegar just to follow a recipe. I was trying to show the base liquid off.

I made vinegar out of anything I could find with alcohol, beers, ales, meads, wines, sake, ciders, and even liquors. I made vinegar out of my wife’s favorite beer. I tried to make vinegar out of Malort! (it doesn’t work). To find the sexy, I started learning how to make as close to balsamic vinegar as one can without time travel, rare woods, or the caves of Modena. I made sherry vinegar, another one of the “sexy” vinegars. I started taking steps back.

I can make my own ciders. I started playing with that. First with frozen concentrate, then with store bought sweet cider, then buying and pressing my own apples. Then changing the mix of those apples. I am positive the apple cider vinegar from any different mix of apples will taste different from any other mix. Another thing that someone can think about if they have the means. What apples were available to make the apple cider vinegar called for in that recipe? It might make a difference to the flavor.

As I said, the process of making does mean that you get exposed to the history as well. I found a woodcut of a vinegar seller with a wheelbarrow. If the Dream is built on trying to have an actual medieval experience, what could be more Dream-like than to demonstrate how vinegar was sold (at least somewhere). I am trying to move you to a more medieval experience. Here is a period style vinegar, “sold” to you in a period style, by a guy dressed in period style. Isn’t that the Dream? Isn’t that what we are playing for?

What am I doing? I am hoping to get people to think differently. That words like sugar, honey, and vinegar meant specific things to the people in the various regions and times of the world. It is very much a modern conceit that all Big Macs must taste the same. I am providing, as much as I am able to, a tool for those who cook to experience something different. My vinegars aren’t mass produced from leftover, unsellable liquors. They are complex and bright. I am aiming to provide an experience. Time will tell if I succeed.

Why am I doing it? I am a human. I have ego. I want to be special in some way. Very few people are doing what I am doing and perhaps no one else is doing exactly what I am doing. I want to give to others as well. I can do this thing. Others can take what I did and do something with it. The herdsman raises the cattle, the butcher slaughters it, the chef cooks it, the server serves it, the King offers it to his guests, and peace is ensured. The better and more authentic I can be, the better and more authentic they can be.

I remember going to Boar’s Head in Dec 2019. I had met the head cook for the feast maybe once at KWC&B that summer. Once I got on site, I went back to the kitchen with a quart of vinegar, I didn’t even have to open my mouth. The cook turns to see who opened the door and with a warm smile, “You’re Oswyn, right? What do you have for me?” That is why I do it.