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Sugar Vinegar

A fermented vinegar made by boiling spring water, dissolving sugar, adding cold water, yeast, and fermenting for nine days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Sugar Vinegar

Why it works: Sugar and spread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sugar Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sugar water

  1. Boil the spring water and skim thoroughly.

  2. Add 2 pounds of coarse sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add 1 quart of cold water to every gallon of hot water.

Ferment

  1. When cool, add the toast spread with yeast.

  2. Stir for nine days.

  3. Transfer to a barrel.

  4. Place in a sunny spot, covering the bunghole with a piece of slate.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

  1. Sugar + spreadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into the acids that make the vinegar sour.
Toast spread with yeast
Supplies yeast and microbes that start the fermentation.

The step that matters

Add the yeast toast only when the liquid is cool. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the water must have cooled before the toast is added or fermentation may never start.

“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.

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