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Camp Vinegar

A vinegar infused with cayenne pepper, soy sauce, walnut ketchup, anchovies, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Camp Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vinegar

  1. Combine cayenne pepper, soy sauce, walnut ketchup, anchovies, and garlic in a jar.

  2. Pour in the vinegar and shake the jar well.

  3. Let the mixture steep for one month, shaking the jar frequently.

Strain and store

  1. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve and transfer to small bottles.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly and store them.

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.

  1. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the vinegar during steeping, adding a deep savory, salty backbone.
Walnut ketchup
Contributes concentrated savory, umami flavour that deepens over the steeping month.
Soy sauce
Adds salty, savory depth that rounds out the sharp vinegar.
Vinegar
Acts as the solvent and sharp acidic base that extracts and preserves the other flavours.
Cayenne pepper
Supplies heat from capsaicin, which slowly infuses into the vinegar during steeping.

The step that matters

Steeping for one month with frequent shaking. Flavours from the solids only pass into the vinegar slowly. Shaking keeps the ingredients in contact with the liquid, so extraction is even. Stopping early leaves the flavour weak and unbalanced.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sauce, ketchup, clove, garlic, vinegar):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sauce, ketchup, clove, garlic, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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