Name: Treacle Vinegar
Ingredients: 1 pint of treacle; ½ pint of good white-wine vinegar

Why it works: Wine and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,493 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Treacle Vinegar

Ingredients

1 pint of treacle
½ pint of good white-wine vinegar

Directions

Mix the treacle and vinegar together in a bowl.
Bottle the mixture for use.

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.

Wine + vinegartop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,493 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Treacle: Provides sweetness and a thick, dark body that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
White-wine vinegar: Adds acidity and a sharp tang that cuts through the sweetness of the treacle.

“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.