Name: Celery and Sweet Herbs Vinegar
Ingredients: 2 cups celery seed; sharp vinegar

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 and Sweet Herbs Vinegar

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

2 cups celery seed
sharp vinegar

Directions

Infuse

Pound the celery seeds and place them in a bottle.
Fill the bottle with sharp vinegar.
Shake the bottle every day for two weeks.

Finish

Strain the mixture and bottle it for use.

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 seed: Releases its aroma and flavour into the vinegar as it steeps.
Sharp vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts and carries the celery flavour.

“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.