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Spiced Vinegar

A flavored vinegar made by steeping cider vinegar with spices, herbs, and sugar for three weeks.

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

Make the vinegar

  1. Combine all ingredients in a jar.

  2. Cover the jar tightly and let it stand for three weeks.

  3. After three weeks, strain the mixture and bottle it.

Use

  1. Use the spiced vinegar for flavoring salads and other dishes.

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
Acts as the base liquid that extracts flavour from the spices and herbs 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 carries into the finished vinegar.
Onions
Release sulphur compounds and sugars that add savoury depth to the infused vinegar.
Sugar
Rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Cover the jar tightly and let it stand for three weeks. Flavour is extracted slowly by diffusion from the spices, herbs and onion into the acidic liquid. A loose cover can let the vinegar evaporate or pick up contamination, and steeping for less time leaves the flavour weak.

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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