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Bitter Widow Recipe

Salt House, a great urban tavern in San Francisco, sometimes serves a cocktail called the Bitter Widow (really just a Negroni, with vodka standing in for the...

By chow · From Open Recipes · 5 ingredients
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Bitter Widow Recipe

Why it works: Vermouth and vodka share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Bitter Widow Recipe

1 drink

Ingredients

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By chow. Recipe from Open Recipes.

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. Vermouth + vodkatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Vermouth + orangetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together83 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Vodka + orangetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together202 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vermouth, vodka):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vermouth, vodka. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.