Name: Elder Flower and Tarragon Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 quart elder flowers or tarragon leaves; vinegar

Why it works: Tarragon and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,547 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Elder Flower and Tarragon Vinegar

Ingredients

1 quart elder flowers or tarragon leaves
vinegar

Directions

Infuse

Fill a quart bottle with elder flowers or tarragon leaves.
Pour vinegar over the flowers or leaves.
Let it infuse for two weeks.

Strain and bottle

Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.
Transfer the infused vinegar into small bottles.

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.

Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,547 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Elder flowers or tarragon leaves: Provide the main aroma and flavour that the vinegar takes on during infusion.
Vinegar: Acts as the solvent that draws flavour out of the flowers or leaves.

“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.