Name: Celery Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 pint boiling vinegar; white part of fresh celery, sliced; ½ ounce bruised celery seed (optional); ½ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Vinegar and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,627 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Vinegar

Ingredients

1 pint boiling vinegar
white part of fresh celery, sliced
½ ounce bruised celery seed (optional)
½ teaspoon salt

Directions

Make the vinegar

Slice the white part of the root and stalks of fresh celery.
Pour 1 pint of boiling vinegar over the celery slices.
Let it cool slightly, then cork the mixture.

Steep and bottle

After three weeks, strain and bottle the vinegar for storage.
If celery is unavailable, use ½ ounce of bruised celery seed instead.

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.

Vinegar + celerytop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,627 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar: Acts as the liquid that extracts and carries the celery flavour during steeping.
Celery: Supplies the aroma and flavour that infuse into the vinegar as it steeps.
Celery seed: Can replace fresh celery, providing a concentrated celery aroma to the vinegar.

“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.