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Sauce

Vinegar Sauce

A simple vinegar-based sauce made with water, vinegar, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,652 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vinegar Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine vinegar, salt, and flour. Beat well until smooth.

  2. Add the boiling water to the mixture and stir thoroughly.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Vinegar + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated in the liquid.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the sauce its tangy flavor.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Cook for the full 10 minutes after the mixture boils. Flour starch only thickens fully once it is heated in the liquid and cooked through. Stopping early can leave the sauce thin and give it a raw, pasty taste.

“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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