PUCKER UP

The offbeat indulgence of handmade vinegar.

- HANNAH GOLDFIELD

A couple of weeks ago, Chris Crawford, a former restaurant chef who prefers to be called a cook, gave me a tour of the place that she refers to as her "factory."The description is technically true, but it's also funny, considering that it's a single room in which Crawford usually works alone. The eleven-hundred-square-foot space, situated on a high floor of a building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is equipped with an induction burner, a microscope, and a big sink, plus bouquets of lemon verbena and whole persimmons hanging from the ceiling to dry.

About half the room is occupied by tall shelving units, lined with hundreds of large plastic pails. Crawford, a petite forty-one-year-old with elfin features, is the founder and the sole full-time employee of a company called Tart Vinegar. She has made a name for herself selling vinegar fermented from a surprising array of ingredients: celery, lavender, rose with sour cherry and Concord grape (a variety she markets as True Romance). Prying off the lid of one bucket, and then another, she dipped in a ladle, bringing the vinegar to her lips as if it were soup, and encouraged me to do the same.