Vinegar used to be such a straightforward thing: a condiment so modest, you barely knew it was in the house. It came, when I was growing up, in two forms. There was malt, which was always Sarson’s (glass bottle, maroon label); and there was wine (most of which, in our house, was red and had been transported in semi-industrial quantities from France at the end of the summer holidays). The emergence of the former from the pantry signalled the treat that was fish and chips, though my mother occasionally used it for cleaning, too (finding me heartbroken after some stupid love affair, she once set about scrubbing all my filthy windows with vinegar, hot water and scrunched newspapers, a move she correctly surmised would instantly cheer me up). The latter was only ever used in salad dressing, and a favourite sweet and sour pork dish, the recipe for which came from a 70s Cordon Bleu magazine (I hope it will not seem like boasting if I tell you that my mum had all 72 in the series, and the binders).

In the 80s, balsamic vinegar arrived, though it reached the provinces only slowly; it was the 90s before I caught sight of it, splashed in all its shiny brownness across a dish of mozzarella at an establishment (Wiz? Woz?) then run by Antony Worrall Thompson (I was by then in London). Delia Smith briefly went mad for it, as a result of which there was wild talk in some quarters of adding a hint of it to strawberries, the better to bring out their sweetness. But pretty soon we all went off it anyway; too much of it was factory produced, and tasted of nothing but sugar (the good stuff, from Modena, ferments and acidifies for a year, after which it sets off on a long – 12 months at a minimum – journey to maturity in a series of barrels, each one of which is smaller than the last and, ideally, made from a different kind of wood). People seem to feel about balsamic vinegar now as they do about Camp coffee or mushroom ketchup: the bottle stays on the cupboard shelf only on the grounds that it just might one day be useful – though God knows when or why.

Cut to 2017. Doubtless it has not escaped your notice that vinegar is suddenly a big deal, part of a more generalised infatuation with all things fermented, among them kombucha, a kind of sweet tea, and kefir, the drink made from cow’s milk with which Tom in The Archers is so obsessed. Lots of people make their own vinegar now – a friend of mine can often be seen furtively gathering leftover wine from abandoned dinner tables, to the point where I begin to worry someone won’t get the wrong idea and perform an intervention – and some are even drinking (flavoured) vinegar again, something that was last fashionable in the late 19th century (though the habit, I have read, lingered on in Yorkshire until after the war, thanks to the fact that raspberry vinegar was traditionally a condiment for yorkshire pudding). Chefs, meanwhile, seem to be more interested in acidity than of old, for which reason – hooray – dishes such as leeks vinaigrette are making a comeback (another recipe, incidentally, that can be found in my mother’s retro magazine collection).

Thanks to all this, it might be posh vinegars that cooks will hope to get for Christmas rather than, as of old, posh olive oil. However, if this seems, to those doing the buying, a bit “I-wandered-into-my-local-deli-and-grabbed-the-first-overpriced-thing-I-saw”, I recommend instead the excellent present that is Acid Trip by the American food writer Michael Harlan Turkell. Not only does it contain tons of brilliant sharp and sour recipes from around the world – if I could only get my hands on a bottle of champagne vinegar, I would make the salmon crudo with piccalilli from the restaurant Public in New York like a shot – it also explains how to go about making your own vinegar.

Yes, at the most basic level, all you have to do is leave some wine open on your kitchen counter for a couple of weeks, at the end of which, if you’re lucky, you’ll have made it without even trying. But who knows? You might get hooked, at which point he’ll be on hand with advice as to how to make vinegars flavoured with coconut rice, dried cherries, Campari and even – this is seriously outré – cardamom. Personally, I am not hooked yet. But I enjoy reading him. In my fantasy life, which is somewhat of a sad realm these days, I can quite see myself serving a salad dressed with a flamboyant spritz of my very own home made elderflower liqueur vinegar.