Name: Green Mint Vinegar
Ingredients: mint leaves (pounded or chopped); pale brown vinegar

Why it works: Mint and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Green Mint Vinegar

Ingredients

mint leaves (pounded or chopped)
pale brown vinegar

Directions

Infuse

Fill wide-necked bottles lightly with mint leaves.
Pour pale brown vinegar over the mint.
Infuse for one month.

Strain and bottle

Strain the mixture into small bottles.
Cork the bottles well.

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.

Mint + vinegartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,376 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

Mint leaves: Provide the fresh minty aroma and flavour that the vinegar draws out.
Pale brown vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts mint flavour and adds 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.