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

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 ounce bruised celery seed (optional)
½ teaspoon salt

Directions

Infuse the celery

Place the sliced celery in a wide-necked bottle or pickle jar.
Pour the boiling vinegar over the celery.
Once slightly cooled, cork the bottle and let it sit for three weeks.

Strain and store

After three weeks, strain the mixture and bottle it for storage.
If celery root is unavailable, use bruised celery seed instead.

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 fresh, savory celery flavor that the vinegar draws out over time.
Vinegar: Acts as the liquid that extracts and carries the celery flavor and keeps the infusion stable.

“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.