Skip to main content
Drink

Cucumber Vinegar

A vinegar made by fermenting cucumbers, onions, shallots, and spices in white wine vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cucumber Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the cucumbers and onions.

  2. Chop the shallots and place them in a bottle.

  3. Add the vinegar, salt, Cayenne pepper, and garlic vinegar to the bottle.

Steep and finish

  1. Let it stand for a week, shaking it occasionally.

  2. Boil the mixture.

  3. Strain it through a fine sieve.

  4. Bottle it 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.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Cucumber + shallottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cucumber + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 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

Cucumbers
Supply the main vegetable flavor and moisture that infuses into the vinegar.
White wine vinegar
Acts as the liquid base that extracts and preserves the flavors of the vegetables and aromatics.
Onions
Add savory, aromatic depth to the infused vinegar.
Shallots
Contribute a mild, sweet onion aroma that blends into the vinegar.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture stand for a week. Flavor only develops as the vinegar slowly extracts compounds from the vegetables and aromatics over time. Shaking occasionally keeps the solids in contact with the liquid, so stopping the steeping early leaves the vinegar weak and underflavored.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, shallot, white wine, vinegar, pepper, garlic):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Kalefits about as well
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, shallot, white wine, vinegar, pepper, garlic. 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.

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes