Name: Economical Vinegar
Ingredients: sound cores and parings of apples; cold water; ½ pint molasses for every 2 gallons

Why it works: Apple and molasses work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 970 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Economical Vinegar

Ingredients

sound cores and parings of apples
cold water
½ pint molasses for every 2 gallons

Directions

Prepare

Save the cores and parings from apples used in cooking.
Place them in a jar and cover with cold water.
Add ½ pint of molasses for every 2 gallons of water.

Ferment

Cover the jar with gauze and place it in a warm location.
Occasionally add more apple parings and cores.

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.

Apple + molassestop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together970 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apple cores and parings: Supply the sugars and natural yeasts that ferment the liquid into vinegar.
Molasses: Adds extra sugar to feed the fermentation, speeding the conversion to acetic acid.

“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.