Name: Any Other Vinegar
Ingredients: 2 quarts vinegar; 3 ounces chilis or tarragon or other condiments

Why it works: Vinegar and tarragon 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 ↓

Any Other Vinegar

Ingredients

2 quarts vinegar
3 ounces chilis or tarragon or other condiments

Directions

Make the infusion

Add the chilis or tarragon to the vinegar.
Bottle and cork it tightly.
Let it sit for four weeks.

Strain and store

Strain the mixture and refill the bottle with the clear vinegar.
Cork it again; it is now ready for use.
The chilis or tarragon can be reused a second time.

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 + tarragontop 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

Vinegar: Acts as the liquid base that extracts and carries the flavor of the infused ingredients.
Chilis or tarragon: Release their aromatic and flavor compounds into the vinegar 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.