Name: Sap or Sttgar Vinegar
Ingredients: 4 pails of sap; mother from good vinegar; 1 quart sugar; 7 quarts moderately warm water

Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sap or Sttgar Vinegar

Ingredients

4 pails of sap
mother from good vinegar
1 quart sugar
7 quarts moderately warm water

Directions

Boil the sap

Boil down 4 pails of sap to one-fourth the quantity.
Add the mother from good vinegar and set in a warm place.

Age

Let it sit for at least 2 months before using.

Make sugar vinegar

For sugar vinegar, mix 1 quart sugar with 7 quarts moderately warm water.
Add good mother and set in a warm place or cover with thin muslin and place in the sun.

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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sap: Supplies the sugars that the culture ferments, forming the base of the vinegar.
Mother: Supplies the live bacteria that convert the liquid into acetic acid.
Sugar: Feeds the fermenting culture, which turns the sweet liquid 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.