As many of you must know by now, Antarctic poetry, wireless bras, the history of table tennis, online dating for older adults, bluegill fishing, and my collection of seventeenth century cookbooks are among my varied interests. Last weekend, while I sat in my Subaru gnawing Casey’s chips and waiting on my daughter to exit the theater (She’s in Legally Blonde, though I don’t fully comprehend her part—either a sorority sister, a jump rope instructor, or a talking tree), I read from The English Housewife: Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to be in a Complete Woman (1615), which stated: “To make dry vinegar which you may carry in your pocket, you shall take blades of green corn, either wheat or rye, and beat it in a mortar with the strongest vinegar you can get till it come to a paste; then roll it into little balls, and dry it in the sun till it be very hard; when you have an occasion to use it, cut a little piece thereof and dissolve it in wine, and it will make a strong vinegar.”

Perhaps you thought Casey’s somehow sprayed vinegar on their chips. Wrong. That would result in a wet, soggy potato. The vinegar is a dry maltodextrin powder. It tastes vivid! Holy malolactic fermentation! Holy forehead sweat! This vinegar makes one ponder pain and regret, the time I leapt off a roof and broke my calcaneus (a key bone for walking), the time a tall and kind Chilean acquaintance walked away into a summer gale of memory, credit card debt, drinking and eBaying, consuming raw ghost peppers on a bet, hornets, electricity, madness, sex, love, lipstick, betrayal, kitchen grease fires, war, whimsy, Facebook, lost dachshunds, horrors, God, death, paperwork, cocktails, irate emails, drywall scars, the time outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama I cursed and beached the canoe and impulsively picked a stick off a mudflat to fling into the coffee-colored Sipsey Swamp. Only it wasn’t a stick. It was a water moccasin. And how did the sea salt taste? Like salt.

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