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Salad Vinegar

A vinegar infused with shallots, sweet savory, chives, tarragon, dried mint, and dried balm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 450 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Salad Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bruise shallots, sweet savory, chives, and tarragon in a mortar.

  2. Place them in a large stone jar.

  3. Add dried mint and balm.

  4. Pour in the vinegar and cork the jar securely.

Infuse

  1. Place the jar in the sun for two weeks.

Strain and bottle

  1. After two weeks, strain the vinegar through a filtering bag.

  2. Transfer the strained vinegar into small bottles and cork them tightly.

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.

  1. Shallot + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Chive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tarragon + minttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Shallots
Adds a mild onion-like aroma that flavours the vinegar as it steeps.
Tarragon
Contributes its distinctive aromatic flavour to the infused vinegar.
Chives
Adds a fresh, mild onion flavour and aroma to the vinegar.
Vinegar
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the herbs and carries it into the final liquid.

The step that matters

Corking the jar securely before the two-week sun steep. A tight seal keeps the vinegar from evaporating and keeps outside air and contaminants from entering during the long steep, which protects both flavour and safety.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, chive, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, chive, tarragon, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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