Name: Herb Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 quart boiling vinegar; 1 bunch of sweet herbs (such as savory, thyme, sage, celery, mint, tarragon, parsley, or sweet marjoram)

Why it works: Vinegar and thyme are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,305 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Herb Vinegar

Ingredients

1 quart boiling vinegar
1 bunch of sweet herbs (such as savory, thyme, sage, celery, mint, tarragon, parsley, or sweet marjoram)

Directions

Wash the bunch of herbs thoroughly in cold water.
Cover the herbs with 1 quart of boiling vinegar and let the mixture sit until the vinegar is infused with the herb flavor.
Pour off the vinegar for use.
Repeat the process with another quart of vinegar, using the same bunch of herbs.
Flavor a total of 3 quarts.

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.

Vinegar + thymetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,305 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

Vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts the aromatic oils and flavor compounds from the herbs.
Sweet herbs: Supply the aromatic oils that flavor the vinegar.

“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.