Last night over dinner, the small child was telling us that they are studying sea creatures at the moment and he was asking me about blue bottles (which strangely I was writing about just last week). I told the Small Child that blue bottles are a type of jellyfish and that I was stung by one once when I was about his age…. and gave him a truncated version of how it’s sting feels like a bee sting and how they used vinegar to try and soothe it (which I just read on that Wikipedia link is NOT a recommended treatment method for treating Portugese Man O’ War/blue bottle stings!).
To which the Small Child responded: "What is vinegar made out of?"
Nonplussed Mom:
*blink blink* "Errr… I’m not sure actually… I suppose it is fermented from some sort of grain, perhaps wheat?"
How could we not know what vinegar is made from? It’s a pantry staple and we’ve been using white vinegar, balsamic vinegar and even rice wine vinegar our whole lives? How could we not know how it’s made? So I grabbed a bottle of vinegar out of the pantry thinking there would be a table of ingredients listed:
100% vinegar
Really helpful that. Oh well.. thanks to the internets we were able to look it up
Vinegar : a sour liquid consisting of dilute and impure acetic acid, obtained by acetous fermentation from wine, cider, beer, ale, or the like: used as a condiment, preservative, etc.
No doubt you lot are all going to tell me that you always knew the process used to make vinegar and I’m going to look like an ignorant twat…. again.
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