Name: Antique Wine Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 pound ripe, highly flavored strawberries; 1½ pints fine pale white wine vinegar

Why it works: White wine and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,776 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Antique Wine Vinegar

Ingredients

1 pound ripe, highly flavored strawberries
1½ pints fine pale white wine vinegar

Directions

Infuse the vinegar

Remove the stalks from the strawberries and place them in large glass jars or wide-necked bottles.
Pour 1½ pints of fine pale white wine vinegar over the strawberries.
Cover the jars with thick paper and let the strawberries steep for 3 to 4 days.

Replenish and strain

After steeping, pour off the vinegar and strain it through a jelly bag or cloth to remove the strawberries.
Replace the strawberries with an equal weight of fresh strawberries and pour the vinegar over them.
Repeat the steeping process after 3 days, using slightly fewer strawberries each time.

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.

White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,776 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries: Provide the fruit flavour and aroma that the vinegar takes up during steeping.
White wine vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the strawberries and gives the sharp acidity.

“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.