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Spiced Vinegar

A spiced vinegar made by steeping cider vinegar with herbs, spices, garlic, onions, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spiced Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a jar and cover it well.

  2. Let it stand for three weeks.

  3. Strain and bottle the mixture.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cider vinegar
Provides the acidity that carries the flavours and helps preserve the mixture.
Onions
Release sugars and aromatic compounds into the vinegar, adding savoury depth over time.
Celery seed
Contributes a warm, earthy aroma that infuses into the vinegar during steeping.
Dried mint
Adds a cool, aromatic herbal note that steeps into the vinegar.

The step that matters

Let it stand for three weeks. Flavours from the spices, herbs and onion are extracted slowly by the acid over time. Rushing this stage leaves the vinegar thin and tasting mostly of raw vinegar rather than the blended seasonings.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, vinegar, celery, parsley, garlic, clove, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, vinegar, celery, parsley, garlic, clove, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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