Name: Honey Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 pound honey; 1 gallon vinegar

Why it works: Honey and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,586 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Honey Vinegar

Ingredients

1 pound honey
1 gallon vinegar

Directions

Combine 1 pound of honey with 1 gallon of vinegar.
Stir the mixture well.
Place the mixture in the sun to infuse.

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.

Honey + vinegartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,586 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

Honey: Provides sweetness and the sugars that ferment into the vinegar's flavour and character.
Vinegar: Provides the acidic base that preserves the mixture and carries the honey's flavour.

“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.