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Salad Vinegar

A vinegar infused with shallots, sweet savory, chives, tarragon, dried mint, and balm, steeped in white wine vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 450 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Salad Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the shallots, sweet savory, chives, tarragon, dried mint leaves, and balm in a mortar.

  2. Put the mixture into a stone jar and add the white wine vinegar.

Steep

  1. Cork the jar securely and let it stand in the sun for two weeks.

Strain and filter

  1. Strain the mixture, pressing as much juice as possible from the herbs.

  2. Filter the vinegar through a flannel bag.

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. Shallot + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Chive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tarragon + minttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Shallots
Adds a mild onion-like aroma that flavours the vinegar as it steeps.
Sweet savory
Contributes a peppery, herbal aroma to the infused vinegar.
Chives
Adds a delicate onion flavour and fresh herbal aroma.
Tarragon
Provides the characteristic anise-like aroma that defines the vinegar.
White wine vinegar
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour compounds from the herbs and provides acidity.

The step that matters

Pounding the herbs in the mortar. Bruising the herbs breaks open their cell walls so the vinegar can draw out their aromatic oils and flavour compounds during steeping. Under-pounded herbs yield a weak, flat infusion.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, chive, tarragon, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, chive, tarragon, white wine, 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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