Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Fruit Vinegar
Ingredients
Directions
Make the vinegar
Cover the fruit with vinegar and let it stand for three days and nights.
Press the mixture through a cloth until the juice runs clear.
To every three quarts of juice, add five pounds of sugar.
Boil for ten minutes and skim well.
When cold, bottle the mixture.
Serve
Use a few spoonfuls in a tumbler of cold water.
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.
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Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together20,806 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Fruit or berries
- Provides the flavour and juice that the vinegar extracts and carries into the syrup.
- Vinegar
- Draws out the fruit's juice and flavour and gives the final drink its tang.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the mixture and, boiled down, thickens it into a syrup that preserves it.
The step that matters
Boil for ten minutes and skim well. Boiling the juice with sugar concentrates it and helps preserve the syrup, while skimming removes foam and impurities that would otherwise spoil the bottled mixture.
“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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