Prep School Daily: The Preparedness Uses of Vinegar: Condiment, Cleaner, Medicine, and More

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

The Preparedness Uses of Vinegar: Condiment, Cleaner, Medicine, and More

For our tenth wedding anniversary, my husband took me to Boston. He happened to have a week of training scheduled there, so while he was stuck in that, I got to explore the area on my own, and I absolutely loved driving up to Maine and walking the Freedom Trail in Boston. The fall colors in Concord were breathtaking. Few places can match Lexington Green for the feeling of standing on sacred ground.

One of the souvenirs I picked up along the way, The American Frugal Housewife, by Mrs. Child, reads like a manual written for young brides. I’m not sure whether I picked it up for education or entertainment. I don’t think I gleaned much from it; there didn’t seem to be much commonality in life between 1830s New England and 1990s Nevada. The one thing that has stuck with me all this time is Mrs. Child’s recommendation to buy vinegar by the barrel or half-barrel. “It is poor economy to buy vinegar by the gallon.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen vinegar sold in anything larger than a gallon jug, and so while keeping that tidbit of info tucked away in my brain, I didn’t do much with it. It was just vinegar. My life was so much different than hers.

Courtesy of Amy Daczyzyn’s Tightwad Gazette, I started making my own household cleaners and laundry treatments using vinegar, so I developed the habit of keeping a few gallons on hand. And then when I started writing the blog several years ago and learned of the medicinal uses of apple cider vinegar (arthritis, heel spurs, ingrown toenails, infections, lice, scabies), I increased our stores of that item. But nothing crazy. It was just vinegar.

One of my projects this summer has involved writing the next volume of Good Eats, which focuses on condiments, sauces, and salad dressings, etc., and it includes a couple of recipes for making your own vinegar. They take a long time. You don’t want to plan on DIYing them at the start of TEOTWAWKI.

Anyway, as I was organizing material and standardizing the formatting, I kept seeing vinegar everywhere. Everywhere. How many of these recipes call for vinegar? So I counted. Holy cow! A full one-third of the recipes! Mayonnaise, ketchup, salad dressings, and so much more. Beyond those uses, it’s essential for buttermilk and sour cream substitutes and some egg replacements. It can help retard mold growth on cheese and leach calcium from bones (for bone broth) and eggshells (for adding calcium to garden soil).

And then I realized that for all the food, medical supplies, and more that we have stored here, for all the research I’ve done, I have nowhere near enough vinegar. I mean, I didn’t even give any to the kids in their food storage when they married. I just didn’t give a thought to it. And then I thought, perhaps I’m not the only one. So here you go: Buy vinegar. Buy lots. How much? I don’t know. Maybe a gallon of ACV for medicinal purposes. A couple of gallons of distilled white vinegar for cleaning and laundry, so that’s going to vary based on household size and the size of the house to clean. For all those essential condiments, sauces, and salad dressings, perhaps another couple of gallons per person.