Name: Cayenne Vinegar
Ingredients: ½ ounce Cayenne pepper; 1 pint 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 ↓

Cayenne Vinegar

Ingredients

½ ounce Cayenne pepper
1 pint white wine vinegar

Directions

Put Cayenne pepper into a bottle with white wine vinegar.
Cork the bottle tightly and shake it well for a few days.
It will be ready for use soon.

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).
Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + white winetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,433 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Cayenne pepper: Provides the heat and pungent flavour that the vinegar carries.
White wine vinegar: Acts as the solvent that extracts and carries the pepper's flavour and heat.

“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.