Name: Modern Cookery
Ingredients: 1 pint boiling vinegar; white part of fresh celery, sliced; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ½ ounce bruised celery-seed (optional)

Why it works: Vinegar and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,627 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

1 pint boiling vinegar
white part of fresh celery, sliced
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
½ ounce bruised celery-seed (optional)

Directions

Pour and steep

Slice the white part of fresh celery.
Pour 1 pint of boiling vinegar over the celery.
Let it cool slightly, then cork it down.

Age and bottle

After three weeks, strain and bottle for keeping.
For added flavor, boil ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt in the mixture.

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.

Vinegar + celerytop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,627 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar: Provides acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the pickles.
Celery: Supplies the main vegetable flavour and a crisp texture that softens slowly in the vinegar.
Celery seed: Adds a warm, concentrated celery aroma to the 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.