Name: Celery Vinegar
Ingredients: 8 ounces fresh celery (white part of root and stalks), sliced; 1 pint boiling vinegar; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); ½ ounce bruised celery seed (optional)

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 ↓

Celery Vinegar

Ingredients

8 ounces fresh celery (white part of root and stalks), sliced
1 pint boiling vinegar
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
½ ounce bruised celery seed (optional)

Directions

Place the sliced celery in a wide-necked bottle or pickle jar.
Pour in the boiling vinegar.
Cork the bottle and let it cool.
After three weeks, strain the mixture and bottle it for storage.
If using celery seed, add it to the vinegar instead of the celery.
Boil the salt in the vinegar before bottling.

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.

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: Supplies the flavour and aroma that the vinegar draws out as it steeps.
Vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts celery flavour and adds sharp acidity.

“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.