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Tarragon Vinegar

A vinegar infused with tarragon leaves, used as a sauce for meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,547 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tarragon Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tarragon

  1. Gather tarragon just before it blossoms.

  2. Strip the leaves from the larger stalks and place them in small stone jars or wide-necked bottles.

  3. Twist the branches to bruise the leaves.

Steep and bottle

  1. Pour enough vinegar over the tarragon to cover it.

  2. Let it stand for 2 months or longer.

  3. Pour off the liquid, strain it, and transfer to small dry bottles.

  4. Cork the bottles well and use as a sauce for meats.

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. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh tarragon
Its leaves release aromatic oils into the vinegar, giving it the characteristic tarragon flavour.
Vinegar
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the bruised leaves and preserves the infusion.

The step that matters

Bruising the leaves and covering them fully with vinegar. Bruising breaks open leaf cells so flavour compounds can leave the plant tissue. Leaves left above the liquid can spoil or mould, so they should stay fully submerged during the long steep.

“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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