Vinegar
To me, the smell of vinegar is totally disgusting. This substance gets its own page, rather than simply being included under Sour and bitter tastes because though I hate the taste of lemon on (say) fish the smell of lemon on its own is not unpleasant; whereas the smell of vinegar is one of the most revolting encountered. Those of an open sewer or rotting flesh are just about comparable to the effect vinegar has on me. I cross the street to avoid open air food stalls selling chips (AmE: “French fries”), or anything else where vinegar is splashed about.
I cannot eat a meal with any enjoyment in a place where there is a smell of vinegar in the air; far less could I eat any meal of which any part had even the slightest hint of vinegar in the taste. This is rarely a problem for me nowadays because, given that so few eating places have anything at all on the menu that I could consider ordering anyway, I probably only eat out once in several years, and so the problem of the smell of other people's food affecting me eating something in a public place doesn't arise. However if I lived the sort of life where it would be simpler if I ate out a lot, vinegar would count among the top three or four reasons why I couldn't do so anyway.
Dressings and sauces
I have never liked salad very much. I eat crisp lettuce and very thinly sliced fresh cucumber; but I don't like the darker green lettuce or the kind not as crisp as iceberg lettuce, and I don't like cucumber in chunks any more than I like gherkin, or courgette, or other such items, which is not at all.
My mother used to prepare a salad containing lettuce and cucumber and one other main ingredient: tomato. I hate tomato, so that was omitted from my helping. People we visited sometimes offered salad and theirs often had another, fatal ingredient: crumbled cold hard boiled egg — all over it. This meant I declined salad completely.
However there was another component which I learnt while very young was part of the salad excperience of other people: my mother and one or two of my brothers added, from a bottle, something called Salad Cream. This stuff smelled powerfully of vinegar and I hardly needed to read the ingredients to find out whether I would like it; I knew I would hate it. Therefore I was only confirmed in my hatred of the fact that the stuff was produced, and smeared on the lettuce and other items on the plates of people at the same family dinner table, when I saw that it also contained vegetable oil, mustard, and eggs (or their yolks, anyway). Francomane food faddies rave about how superior mayonnaise is to this stuff; as far as I can tell they are equally, triply disgusting.
Go into any large supermarket and walk down the aisle devoted to prepared sauces and salad dressings. Read some of the labels. Almost every single list of ingredients begins with vinegar, which means that it is the main ingredient (the highest proportion of the whole product); and all of them have vinegar in the list somewhere. Actually, that last sentence is not true if we consider the sauces asociated with oriental cookery. In some of those, the place of vinegar is taken by a concoction called soy sauce; but to me that, though made from soya beans, not grapes, and thus not actually qualifying to be labelled "vinegar", Is just as repulsive. Everything I say here about vinegar applies for me to soy sauce also. Ugh!
In cookery
For me, I think just about one microscopic droplet of vinegar in a pint of gravy would ruin the taste of the gravy. You might think that's an exaggeration, but I've been places before where somebody says “there's only a tiny drop; you'll hardly notice it” and when I try it the taste is horrible, and sour, and I know it's the vinegar. Mind you, not only vinegar has this effect: anything sour, like beer (as in some pub meals or bought beef pies), or wine (as in coq au vin), or tomato, or lemon juice, ruins gravy for me.
That remark so often made by cooks reveals the lack of understanding of my plight by all the people who share the "eat everything" and foodie cultures that surround me: whether they claim “you'll hardly notice it” or even “you won't notice it” (that is, you won't notice it at all), the answer is obvious: if you think there is so little that I won't notice it, that means it will make no difference whatever to the taste, in which case — in the name of all things culinary — why on earth do you put it in?
If it's so small an amount as to make no difference to you, just leave it out! But if it does make a difference to you, don't tell me I won't notice it, or imagine that it won't totally ruin the taste for me!
I have never seen a recipe presented on a TV cookery programme which I could eat, and this is usually because of vinegar. The TV cooks go into raptures about balsamic vinegar. Or they just do a perfectly acceptable main ingredient and then say at the end “then you just mix up a dressing ...” or “then you just add a drop of mayonnaise ...”
Taken on its own, to me vinegar smells nauseating. However the actual taste effect in small amounts is a little different: it is essentially sour. I hate utterly all sour or bitter tastes (see Sour & bitter where I continue that discussion).
The attraction of pickles is obviously as much a mystery to me as that of putting vinegar onto or into any food. The thought of fishing a stunted cucumber, let alone a hard boiled egg, out of a large jar full of vinegar in which it has been floating for months, with one's fingers, and then eating it as it is, has always been the stuff only of grotesque nightmare to me.