78. Balsamic Vinegar

Balsamic vinegar is a secret Italians kept to themselves until the mid 1970s, when Chuck Williams of the Williams-Sonoma cookware and gourmet food chain in the United States discovered it and imported some for sale in his stores and catalogs. This occurred at the same time that the fashion for lighter, more flavorful food dishes, called nouvelle cuisine in French and nuova cucina in Italian, began sweeping the culinary world. Creative chefs discovered in balsamic vinegar just the right combination of pungency and sweetness to give the new dishes an exciting and unorthodox flavor. In the last few decades it has become a staple of gourmet cooking in the United States and throughout the world.

Although cheap imitations of balsamic vinegar are now produced in many countries, the real thing can only be found in two small provinces in northern Italy: Modena and Reggio. The reason for this is that making this kind of aceto (the Italian word for vinegar) is labor intensive and requires a knowledge of special processes that have been passed on from generation to generation in this region since the fifteenth century.

Unlike other kinds of vinegar, it is not made from wine but from the "musts" (i.e., the skin and pulp) of crushed grapes that are heated, aged, and stored for very long periods. First rate balsamic vinegar is at least twelve years old, and extra vecchio types can be aged for up to a century! Naturally this latter type is very rare and costly. Italians classify it as vinegar da bere (for drinking) instead of merely being used da condire (as a condiment or dressing). The culinary scholar Burton Anderson reports that Lucrezia Borgia "used Modena's vinegar as a tonic for body and soul."

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