Skip to main content
Drink

Common Vinegar

A fermented liquid made from sugar, water, yeast, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Common Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Boil sugar and water, skimming off any scum.

  2. When warm, spread yeast thickly on both sides of the toasted bread and add it to the mixture.

  3. Let it ferment for 24 hours.

Cask and ferment

  1. Fill a cask with the liquid and place it in a sunny spot.

  2. Cover the bung-hole with a saucer or tile to keep out dust.

  3. Make it in March; it will be ready by July or August.

Bottle

  1. Bottle and cork the vinegar; if not sour enough, let it sit longer.

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

Lisbon sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, which then becomes acetic acid.
Yeast
Starts the fermentation that converts the sugary liquid into alcohol.
Soft water
Forms the liquid base in which the sugar dissolves and ferments.
Bread
Carries the yeast into the mixture, spread on the toasted slice.

“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.

More vinegar recipes

Raspberry 269Celery 75Tarragon 53Horseradish 46Pie 45Garlic 37 See all 14 →

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipesLemonadeLemonade126 recipes