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Camp Vinegar

A vinegar infused with cayenne pepper, soy sauce, walnut ketchup, anchovies, garlic, and vinegar, steeped for a month.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Camp Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vinegar

  1. Combine cayenne pepper, soy sauce, walnut ketchup, anchovies, and garlic in a jar.

  2. Pour in the vinegar and shake the bottle frequently.

  3. Let the mixture steep for one month.

Strain and bottle

  1. Strain through a fine sieve and transfer to small bottles.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly to preserve.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Adds deep savoury, umami flavour that dissolves into the vinegar during steeping.
Walnut ketchup
Contributes concentrated savoury, slightly sweet depth to the infused vinegar.
Soy sauce
Adds salty, fermented umami notes that round out the vinegar.
Cayenne pepper
Provides heat that is slowly extracted into the vinegar during steeping.
Vinegar
Acts as the solvent, extracting flavour from the other ingredients over time.

The step that matters

Steeping for one month. Flavour is extracted slowly into the acidic liquid, so cutting the steeping short yields a weak, unbalanced condiment. Shaking the bottle frequently helps the solids release their flavour evenly into the vinegar.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sauce, ketchup, clove, garlic, vinegar):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sauce, ketchup, clove, garlic, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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