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Gooseberry Vinegar

A fermented vinegar made from gooseberries, sugar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gooseberry Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Boil the spring water and let it cool.

  2. In a large tub, combine the cooled water with the bruised gooseberries.

  3. Let the mixture sit for 60 hours, stirring often.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth.

Ferment in the barrel

  1. For each gallon of liquid, add 1 pound of coarse sugar.

  2. Transfer the mixture into a barrel and add the slice of bread spread with yeast.

  3. Cover the bung hole with a piece of slate.

  4. Place the barrel in the sun, ensuring it is well-painted and the iron hoops are secure.

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.

  1. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 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

Gooseberries
Supply the fruit flavour and acidity that the vinegar is built on.
Coarse sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts during fermentation, feeding the process.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that turns the sweet liquid into alcohol and then vinegar.

“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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