Name: To Make Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 gallon rain water; 1 pint brown sugar or molasses; 1 pint corn, off the cob; 1 pound sugar; small pint hop yeast

Why it works: Sugar and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,168 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Add brown sugar or molasses and corn to rain water in a jar.
Cover the jar with cloth and place it in the sun.
After three weeks, it will be good vinegar.
For another method, add sugar and hop yeast to water and let it sponge until light.
Boil corn until tender, then cool it.
Combine all ingredients in an open keg.
After three weeks, it will be good vinegar.

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.

Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,168 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown sugar or molasses: Provides sugars that the yeast and bacteria ferment into acetic acid.
Hop yeast: Starts the fermentation that turns the sweet liquid into alcohol for vinegar.
Sugar: Provides fermentable sugar that feeds the culture during the sponge stage.

“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.