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Sauce

Pepper Sauce

A sauce made from ripe pepper pods boiled with vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,814 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the pepper pods in half.

  2. Place them in a kettle with the vinegar.

Reduce and strain

  1. Boil until the mixture reduces to 1 quart.

  2. Strain through a sieve.

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. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 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

Pepper pods
Supply the main flavour and heat that the finished sauce carries.
Vinegar
Acts as the liquid that extracts pepper flavour and gives the sauce its sharp acidity.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture reduces to 1 quart. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the flavour and acidity. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and weak, while boiling too long makes it overly sharp and strong. Watch the volume rather than the clock.

“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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