Name: Essence of Celery
Ingredients: 1 ounce celery seed; ½ pint vinegar

Why it works: Celery and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,627 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Essence of Celery

Ingredients

1 ounce celery seed
½ pint vinegar

Directions

Make the essence

Steep the celery seed in the vinegar for several hours.

Use the essence

Use a few drops of the essence to flavor soups or sauces for poultry.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Celery + vinegartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,627 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery seed: Provides the concentrated celery aroma and flavor that the vinegar extracts.
Vinegar: Acts as the solvent that draws flavor compounds out of the celery seed.

“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.