Fire Cider: Benefits and History of Medicinal Vinegars

Vinegar’s sour flavor means it’s classified as hot and dry, and in the spirit of balance would be paired with cold, moist foods (such as pork or fish). This balance of temperature and moisture, using sour and hot foods, is how we get some of our iconic flavor pairings, such as lemon and fish, or vinegar or mustard and pork.

In some cases, these vinegars were plain, while other times, they were infused with other ingredients. We’ve infused vinegar with all kinds of medicinal plants over the years, from fresh herbs to flowers, spices, hot peppers, and citrus. Sometimes for flavor or for health benefits, and sometimes for both. Each of these ingredients brings its own healing properties, from analgesics to adaptogens and antimicrobials, which add to the healing power of vinegar.

Vinegar, with or without other additions, is used medicinally across many cultures. In many traditional medicinal systems, sour flavors are often associated with spring, and vinegar accompanies greens that appear in this season and that our bodies would crave after winter.

Today, we know infusing greens in vinegar (such as the chickweed vinegar I make each spring) is a powerful way to extract minerals from those greens — the very minerals our bodies would need after several months of eating only preserved or dried veggies. In addition to pickling and preserving fruits and vegetables, vinegars offer a shelf-stable way for us to bring minerals into our bodies even when mineral-rich foods aren’t readily available.

Medicinal vinegars, such as fire cider, are antimicrobial and filled with micronutrients to keep us healthy. Before fire cider was fire cider, it was four thieves vinegar, found an ocean away and almost 1,000 years in the past.

The Four Thieves: Vinegar as Medicine

One of the most famous medicinal vinegars is four thieves vinegar, which, as legend has it, first emerged in the Middle Ages. During the bubonic plague that ripped through France, a group of thieves ransacked the homes of the ill and dying, but puzzingly never became ill themselves. The reason? They had a magical, medicinal vinegar that kept the plague at bay. The recipe was a closely guarded secret, but once the thieves were captured, they had to exchange the recipe for their lives.

Four thieves vinegar may have consisted of red or white wine vinegar (or cider vinegar) infused with fresh garlic, plus four herbs: one for each thief. The exact herbs in modern preparations vary (and sometimes spices, such as cloves or cinnamon, are included) but can include tarragon, sage, rosemary, angelica, wormwood, or juniper.

Though said to date back to the Middle Ages, one of the earliest written recipes for four thieves vinegar is quite modern: René-Maurice Gattefossé, sometimes called the “father of aromatherapy,” records one in his 1937 book Aromathérapie; Les Huiles essentielles hormones végétales. His recipe includes more than four herbs, though, and he attributes it to an 18th-century recipe from Marseille that includes 3 pints of white wine vinegar, plus wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram and sage, cloves, Campanula roots, angelica, rosemary, horehound, and camphor, steeped for two weeks before being strained and pressed. Unlike modern four thieves vinegar, which can be applied topically or used in food, this iteration of the preventive was rubbed on the ears, hands, and temples.

Fire Cider: Benefits Amid Controversy

A continent away, another infused vinegar appeared, directly influenced by historic infusions, such as four thieves vinegar.

The long-standing practice of infusing vinegar was brought over by colonizers to the Americas. As with many recipes that travel to a new place, this one was adapted to what was on hand, and there’s no doubt that plants native to this continent (such as hot peppers) would’ve been infused into the vinegars made here, in lieu of plants that weren’t available.

There’s a rich, multicultural history of herbal remedies across the Appalachians and Eastern Seaboard that includes medicinal foods, such as infused vinegar, and draws upon traditions from Europe, Africa, and Indigenous cultures in the Americas.

In the 1970s, Rosemary Gladstar made a modern version of infused vinegar by bringing together a suite of healing botanicals, including alliums, such as garlic and onion, plus hot peppers, spices, herbs, and honey, drawing on her extensive knowledge of herbal medicine traditions. Gladstar bridged the old and the new, making fire cider with a wide variety of ingredients available to modern people but still firmly rooted within the European herbal medicine traditions that brought us four thieves vinegar.

Fire cider continues to be popular today: I regularly teach fire cider classes online and in person, and fire cider can be found in shops, farmers markets, and online. But this beloved tradition almost became inaccessible: In 2012, a company trademarked the name “fire cider” and sued several herbalists for using “its” product name. Interestingly, another company tried to trademark the name “four thieves vinegar” soon after the lawsuit.

Fortunately, the three well-known herbalists were able to show in court that fire cider is a recipe so widely used and adapted that it can’t be trademarked to an individual company. Fire cider, like four thieves vinegar before it, is a widely beloved and appreciated medicine. And ultimately, no one can “own” either one, just as no one can ever own the process of making or infusing vinegar. Fire cider and four thieves vinegar will continue to nourish and heal our bodies for generations to come.

Fantastic Homemade Fire Cider

This recipe is from my book Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods Have Shaped Cultures & Communities.

Fire cider relies on unpasteurized vinegar and is typically made with apple cider vinegar. It also commonly emphasizes hot peppers and alliums. Aside from that, the ingredients are extremely flexible and vary from person to person and even batch to batch. This is a great way to use up vegetable scraps, such as onion tops or herb stems from other cooking projects! The goal is to get as much goodness packed into the jar as possible.

I classify my ingredients into three main groups — roots, shoots and fruits, and spice — and mix and match between them. Fire cider can be enjoyed as a daily tonic by the shot glass or spoonful, or it can be incorporated into recipes, dressings, and marinades in place of apple cider vinegar.

Julia Skinner is the author of Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods have Shaped Cultures & Communities. She’s also the founder of food history and fermentation company Root Kitchens and the author of a weekly food-focused newsletter at Root Kitchens. She’s an avid cook, wildcrafter, researcher, and artist, and she splits her time between Atlanta, Georgia, and Cork, Ireland. You can follow her adventures at @BookishJulia and @RootKitchens.

Continue your journey of learning the history of fermented foods with Julia Skinner, and gain access to more historically significant recipes with her book Our Fermented Lives. In this one-of-a-kind text, she explores the fascinating roots of a wide range of fermented foods across the world with a focus on history and culture, from the evolution of the microbiome to food-preservation techniques, distinctive flavor profiles, and the building of community.

Originally published as “Thieves, Apples and Fire: The Surprising History of Medicinal Vinegars” in the October/November 2023 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.