Name: Vinegar in Balls
Ingredients: ½ cup bramble-berries (half ripe); strong white wine vinegar; wine or stale beer

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 ↓

Vinegar in Balls

Ingredients

½ cup bramble-berries (half ripe)
strong white wine vinegar
wine or stale beer

Directions

Prepare

Dry the bramble-berries and beat them to a powder.
Form the powder into balls the size of nuts using the vinegar.
Dry the balls thoroughly and store them in boxes.

Use

To use, dissolve a ball in wine or stale beer to create strong vinegar.

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).
Vinegar + winetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,493 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).
White wine + winetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Bramble-berries: Provide the bulk of the powder that the balls are formed from.
Strong white wine vinegar: Binds the berry powder so it can be shaped into balls.

“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.