Name: Cider Vinegar
Ingredients: ½ pound sugar; ½ gallon cider

Why it works: Sugar and cider are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,308 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cider Vinegar

Ingredients

½ pound sugar
½ gallon cider

Directions

Put the sugar into a half-gallon jar.
Fill the jar with cider.
Shake it well.
Let it ferment for three to four months.

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.

Sugar + cidertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,308 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cider: Supplies the liquid and natural sugars that ferment into acetic acid, the sour base of the vinegar.
Sugar: Feeds the fermenting microbes, giving them fuel to convert the cider into 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.