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Celery Vinegar

A preserved celery condiment made by boiling vinegar with cayenne or peppercorns, salt, and sliced celery, then aging for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,627 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the vinegar

  1. Add cayenne or peppercorns and salt to boiling vinegar.

  2. Stir in the sliced celery and boil for 2-3 minutes.

Steep and bottle

  1. Pour the mixture into a stone jar and seal it tightly once cooled.

  2. Let it sit for 3-4 weeks before straining and bottling.

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. Vinegar + celerytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,627 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

Vinegar
Provides the acidic liquid that extracts and carries the celery flavour over weeks.
Celery
Supplies the aromatic celery flavour that infuses into the vinegar as it steeps.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the vinegar and adds savoury depth to the finished flavour.

The step that matters

Sealing and waiting for the infusion. Sealing the jar while the mixture is cool keeps aromas in and contamination out. The long rest of 3-4 weeks lets the celery and spices slowly release their flavour into the acidic liquid, so straining too early yields a weak, underdeveloped vinegar.

“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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