A woman in Cheyenne, Wyoming, says her mom used to refer to the cloudy scum that sometimes forms atop vinegar as mother. The term has been around at least 500 years, and can refer to the scum on the top or sediment on the bottom. It’s also used as a verb, and a liquid with that kind of surface can be described with the adjective mothery. A similar cloudy substance that forms atop old wine is called a wineflower. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Vinegar Mother”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yeah, this is Paula from Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Hi, Paula. Welcome.
What can we do for you?
Thank you.
Well, I had a question. My mother had a lot of funny expressions, and one of the things I remember once, you know, we did a lot of cooking in our house, and I remember reaching into the cupboard and pulling out the vinegar. It was white vinegar, and she said something strange. She said, the vinegar has mother. And I thought that was really weird. I mean, she used to accuse us of coming up with weird expressions that didn’t exist. But I thought that was one that she made up.
What was different about the vinegar?
Well, it might have been a little bit cloudy. You know, like I said, we didn’t use it very much, so it might have been in the cupboard for a long time. Possibly, you know, but I don’t know. I thought that was a really strange way to put it. You know, the vinegar is cloudy, the vinegar is old, but I don’t know. That was a funny expression that I could never forget.
So what your mother said was the vinegar has mother?
Mm-That’s how she described it.
Did you ask for more information?
I said, what does that mean? And I think she just said, I think that’s how you say it. I think that’s what you say when your vinegar looks like that. So I think she was repeating something she’d heard.
That’s pretty interesting. Did she do a lot of pickling or canning or have reason to have a particular knowledge about vinegar?
No, I just assumed she grew up in the Midwest, and, you know, five kids, they did a lot of cooking at home, and she probably heard that expression from her mother. I asked about the pickling and the canning because it is a really old term. It’s got at least 500 years of history to call, what shall we say, the spoilage in vinegar, to call it mother as a noun, M-O-T-H-E-R, just like the mother that raised you or birthed you. And typically it can refer to a scum on the top. It can refer to a sediment in the bottom. It can refer to what’s known as a wine flower in wine, which is where the bacteria kind of create a little colony floating on the surface.
Oh, is that what that’s called? I’ve seen that.
So they still use the word mother for wine, too, that cloudiness in wine?
It’s less often, but yeah.
Well, some wine is vinegared. You turn the wine into vinegar. So it’s not that long ago, I would say, within the memory of some of our older people who are currently out there cooking and baking and so forth and pickling things. It was not that long ago that when you bought vinegar, you expected to have to filter it yourself. But nowadays they add things like salt and they have more clarification techniques and take out some of the stuff that makes it hospitable for bacteria and other things.
In any case, yeah, so mother’s got 500 years of history. There’s also the verb to mother, and there’s mothering, and you might say something is mothery if it has an aroma or the appearance of having somehow been spoiled or at least started to be colonized by bacteria.
Could it possibly be like a mispronunciation of the word matter or something like that?
That’s a really great question. Actually, you have the mind of a historical linguist because that is exactly what historical linguists did when they looked into the history.
Well, that’s what I am. I’m a linguist.
Oh, there we go.
Oh, well, there we go. When they looked into the history of this term, there’s a lot of suppositions that they then tried to prove wrong. And it looks like the strongest theory about why it’s called mother is because they believed before people knew what bacteria were, that it had something to do with the essence of the vinegar kind of coming to the surface. Like, think about it as the progenitor of life or the creator of life. Like this was the, you wanted the vinegar, you didn’t want the mother, but the mother was the source of the vinegar.
All right. Thank you so much for your call.
You’re welcome.
Thank you very much for your answer.
All right. Take care.
Thanks, Paula.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
There is another term, if there are any chemists in the audience, they’re going, but, but, but, but. Because there’s a mother in chemistry, which is the liquid that’s left over after you crystallize something. Even in the making of salt, I’m sorry, in the crystallizing of salt or the crystallizing of sugar, the remainder behind is called the mother. And people believe it’s probably related to the same mother that we used to describe the spoiled vinegar.
Like Matrix.
Yeah.
Vinegar mother is the combination of cellulose abd bacteria (Acetobacter aceti) which is resposible for converting alcohol to acetic acid. Hence it is generates (is the “mother” of) the vinegar). In kombucha production the mother is called a SCOBY (special combination of bacteria and yeast). The mother is necessary to the developmet of vinegar. Vinegar which becomes cloudy with mother is not spoiling, it is just active because the bacteria culture is alive and healthy. The vinegar can be strained to remove the cloudyness. There is evidence that these live cultures offer health benefits to our gut bacteria and digestive systems.