On Food and Cooking

Apicius, often enjoyed vinegar in combination
with honey. Pliny said that “no other sauce
serves so well to season food or to heighten a
flavor.” In the Philippines there developed a
tradition of serving a variety of uncooked fish,
meats, and vegetables in vinegar made from
palm sap and tropical fruits. And the Chinese
evolved dark, complex vinegars from rice,
wheat, and other grains, which are sometimes
roasted before fermentation.
For millennia, vinegar was made simply by
allowing partly filled containers of wine and
other alcoholic liquids to sour, an
unpredictable process that took weeks or
months. The first system for more rapid
production, a bed of grapevine twigs over
which the wine was regularly poured to aerate
it, was invented in France in the 17th century.
In the 18th a Dutch scientist, Hermann
Boerhaave, introduced the continuous
trickling of wine over an aerating bed. In the
19th century, Louis Pasteur demonstrated the