Name: Pepper Vinegar
Ingredients: 12 ripe pepper pods; 3 pints vinegar

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 Vinegar

Ingredients

12 ripe pepper pods
3 pints vinegar

Directions

Split the pepper pods.
Boil the split peppers in vinegar until reduced to 1 quart.
Strain the mixture 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.

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 heat and pepper flavor that infuse into the vinegar as it simmers.
Vinegar: Acts as the liquid that extracts flavor from the peppers and gives the finished condiment its sharpness.

“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.