You may still be thinking about food this holiday weekend (holiday, btw, comes from an older word, holy day, which in Old English read this way: háligdæg), so let me give you a food story.

Vinegar is good for dissolving hard water deposits. The manufacturer of my coffee maker instructs me to run a full pot of vinegar through the machine to clear it of calcium build-up which wear it down over time. I don’t think our water in North Georgia is very hard, but it’s hard enough to leave a residue behind which you can see after a while. Leaving water sitting in the kettle causes plates of calcium to form on the bottom.

So one time a while back, I filled the kettle half full of vinegar to clean off those plates. Heating the vinegar seems to work well, but I don’t know if it’s necessary for cleaning. After I let the vinegar work on the kettle (I think it was the next day), I made myself a cup of tea. I think I used a bag of herbal tea we had had for too long, and it must have gone bad because it had a strong acrid taste. It was the worst tea I’d ever made.

But you are likely way ahead of where I was at the time, and you already see that I had steep my tea leaves in boiled vinegar, which is why I entitled this post as I did. If you make your tea with vinegar, friends, you will cap off your beverage’s sweetness at the root. There’s probably an old Chinese proverb about that, maybe “Better to be deprived of food for three days than to drink tea steeped in vinegar.”

Or “As tea in vinegar sours the stomach, so does living with a contentious woman.”