Mellowing Mangosteen Vinegar

This fruit was a childhood joy. Big, fat, purple, sold by push-cart vendors near Mandavelli where we would come to visit my father’s eldest brother and his family in a house with trees and a well at the back. There was an upstairs that offered isolation, a downstairs with a large bath and a toilet in separate rooms (a relief), a porch with a jasmine creeper. A small temple at the end of the road, just a house or two away. There was a car, a Fiat maybe? Lunch was had at 10am, so that Periappa could commence office work and not have to carry lunch or be interrupted by food needs until tea time. This was not Bombay with its rushing workforces; this was slow, laid-back Madras.

I remember these humdrum things and the red, red floors on which I once sat, my mother said, cowering in the midst of marital discord, because my father had lost his temper. In the presence of Anna-Manni, Amma would recall, bitterly, referring to her paternalist in-laws. She never knew how to hold her tongue, Appa would repeat, desperately.

Those days, push-cart vendors would walk the neighborhood roads, calling out their wares. Katthirikkay, vazhakkai, keerai, amma, keerai! [Brinjals, plantains, greens, mother, greens!]. I guess that’s how the household got its daily greens, but I can’t say if that’s how it got its mangustaans. More likely it was Appa who went out and found them somewhere on some other push-cart on the main road or in the markets, where they were brought in from the hills. “Mangustaan!” we would hail its arrival, loud as the vendors, and to this day I have no real understanding of how it became the peculiar Anglo-genteel “Mango-steen” for even the botanical Garcinia mangostana is closer to what we knew. Whatever it got called, joy would follow in its wake. Squooshing the fat purple bodies until they creased and and could be pulled apart, and oh then to find that absolutely perfect, almost floral white interior with sweet-sour and oh-so-juicy segments that were so small, in ratio to the body of the fruit, they were never enough. They slipped down too fast, were gone in a flash. Expensive, always shared, never enough and that, maybe, was part of the enjoyment, too.

That Mandavelli home was a fulcrum for years, our landing place after leaving Bombay because Madras did not yet have its own International Airport. That it was the center of a world was clear the day I found my way there all on my own, though that was never what Appa wanted. He wanted to collect me from the airport, he wanted to know all my dates and my landing times. But he would never have allowed me a Bangalore-detour to meet my would-be in-laws, nor to sit dry-eyed on the couch because Nanna came at the problem of this marriage with indisputable rationality, and even less to cry piteously when Amma offered comfort with just the lightest hands laid on my stooped shoulders. Knowing Appa, he worried helplessly while I cried in Bangalore, but to what end? he must have rationalized, ever the practical man. Still, his face was dark when he returned to Mandavelli to find his older daughter suddenly and at last there, in one of those rooms with the red-red floors, her hair bob-cut much too short, smiling too widely at her own triumph of way-finding in some futile attempt at covering up the missing days and the missed phone calls.

I don’t recall having any mangustaans that year. Another Periappa’s son was getting married and my parents were smiling themselves too widely in their own futile attempts at covering-up their daughter’s misdeeds against all those familial prying eyes and nosey noses.

By the time Appa came back to Mandavelli with a wedding card in his hand to present his oldest brother, the porch, the little room to one side and maybe more had been ceded to a grand new bedroom with an AC installed, and a spacious living room with a tiled floor. Eventually, there’d be separate entrances for tenants who would pay good rent for most of the house and no jasmine creeper or really any green space to speak of. But not quite yet.

It was custom in Appa’s family for the oldest brother, my Periappa, to do all the wedding inviting, even for the nieces and nephews he hardly knew. When Appa presented him with a card printed for colleagues in Nigeria with his own and my mother’s names on it, “So,” he said, “This is not an invitation, this is an intimation.” If there was cruelty that could reside inside the shell of clever word play, this certainly was an instance of it.

I cannot think of when we went back to Mandavelli again, except for the briefest of visits, though Appa likely did when his oldest brother died and many times after to see his widowed sister-in-law. Nor can I recall now when he last bought us mangustaans, but I know very well that he mellowed over the years in the way that the mangustaan vinegars I would eventually make also did. His younger outbursts became the plaintive complaints of an older life: “Your mother is once again blowing hot and cold,” he would say on phone, for the thousandth time. “I know, Appa,” I would offer, mildly, “she never knows when to stop.”

I didn’t take to making mangustaan vinegars for years; that fruit was always only for eating. But there were many times when the fruits were imperfect, not unlike our little dispersed nuclearized families, white pulp too enmeshed with astringent purple fibres to eat without interference. That imperfection, those defects were my vinegar beginnings. I tossed the bits in a jar with sugar and a few stray lychees, and watched them bubble for days like the energetic youth my parents once were, entirely unequal to their own life-choices and trapped in jars of their own choosing. At some mostly arbitrary point, I would strain the pulp out and watch the conversion to vinegar happen in that very jar set at one end of my kitchen window sill. And then the long, slow mellowing: a reconciliation with the jar, peace with the window-sill seat (with, after all, a view of the garden), and an acceptance of the truths of growing older now with quietude and grace.

There are dozens of ways to use vinegars well beyond salad dressings, in drinks [like shrubs], to braise meats or stew stuffed vegetables [like the mahshi of Middle-Eastern/North African provenance which become the mahashais of Cochin Jewish food]. But I came at them with more curiosity than culinary purpose, wanting to see the conversion more than to benefit from its outcomes, and a certain no-waste mindset. Scraps, less-than-perfect fruit, foraged jamuns or overripe ones all are happy becoming vinegars–happier, I’d think, to become vinegars first before pulp went to compost bins. Midway, they’re easy enough to re-purpose into switchels (with water, ginger, and molasses), shrubs, and drinking vinegars (like kombucha) for that million dollar probiotic fix.

A basic wild ferment fruit vinegar recipe

This is a wild fermentation recipe, which means that it uses all the yeasts and microflora already present in your environment and your fruit to kick-start fermentation. Use this recipe to ferment any fruit or combination of fruits to make vinegars and shrubs to your taste. The possibilities are endless! But thankfully the process is all the same. And you may never purchase either a shrub syrup or a vinegar from a store again.

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Ingredients

  

• ½ kilogram or a little over a pound of fruit and washed peels.
• ½ cup sugar plus 2 tablespoons
• Water

Instructions

 

Choose the fruit

• Know your ingredients and choose the fruit wisely: pineapple, jamun, mangosteen, lychee, cashew apple, pomelo, mango, kelakkai or caronda all work very well.
• Combinations can work well, too: mangosteen and a little lychee, for example (but too much lychee seems to encourage slime, so keep he mangosteen-to-lychee ration high in favor of mangosteen). But, depending on the tannin content of the fruit and peels (jamun, mangosteen), or their bitterness (pomelo), you might wind up with a vinegar that has the mouthfeel of a red wine or is much more like white.
• Use the peels as well as the fruit, though you can adjust ratios in favor of fruit for taste reasons. Mangosteen “husk” brings a good deal of astringency, but pineapple peel of course is fine in any quantity.

Prepare the ferment

• Once you’ve chosen your fruit—add them to a glass jar large enough to accommodate the mixture and with plenty of headspace to spare, along with the sugar. Add water barely enough to cover the fruit and mix well.
• Cover the mouth of the jar with cheesecloth or a thin Kerala towel piece doubled-up and secure with a rubber band or other tie.
• Stir the mixture once a day for a week-to-10-days. You should see the natural, “wild” yeasts on the skins of the fruit starting to bubble and ferment the sugars into ethanol, releasing some carbon dioxide.
• If you do NOT see enough signs of fermentation, you could add a little whey (the almost clear liquid that gathers and pools in yogurt containers) and see if that helps. Make sure your yogurt culture is raw and relatively fresh though.
• If the bubbling is unnaturally vigorous, or you see other signs of things going wrong: mouldy growth, anything but acrid smells, liquid becoming slimy, then it’s best to discard and start over.
• If all seems well, taste the liquid—it should be souring and maybe also a little sweet from the sugar added to fuel the fermentation. You can add another tablespoon or two of sugar about a week in, just to ensure that fuelling is sufficient.
• After about 10 days, strain out and discard the solids, and add the liquid back to the jar to ferment into vinegar. This time, cap the jar but lightly.
• Check the vinegar periodically, after every 2 weeks or so. It may take a while to convert fully—3-4 months—all the more since this is a wild fermentation and with no starter used. Taste the vinegar for acidity. If it feels like it is intensifying, then all is well. If it seems like it’s turning bitter and you see any signs of mouldy growth on the surface, then it’s best to discard and start over.
• You should see some thickening somewhere in the jar—bottom, sides, surface. That’s the mother. Strain her out and bottle the vinegar, reserving the mother for use as starter in the next vinegar batch.
• If there isn’t much of a mother (as there hasn’t really been with my cashew apple vinegars), then leave your brew as is.
• You can use the vinegar at any point from now on, or age it for a year or more to mellow the flavors.
• Begin a new batch with your mother added in to speed the process, or give some of it away as a starter.