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Another Wat to Make Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon dish made with lemons, salt, horseradish, mustard flour, spices, and vinegar, left to mature for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Another Wat to Make Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemons and place them in a large bowl.

  2. Sprinkle the salt over the lemons.

  3. Add the sliced horseradish, mustard flour, white pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and cayenne pepper.

  4. Pound the spices together and mix them with the lemons.

Cook and cure

  1. Pour in the vinegar and bring the mixture to a boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a jar and let it sit for 3 weeks, stirring daily.

Strain and store

  1. After 3 weeks, strain the mixture through a sieve.

  2. Store the lemon pickle in small bottles.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the main acidic, aromatic body of the pickle and its sharp flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve the mixture.
Horseradish
Adds pungent heat and sharpness that mellows during the long rest.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the pickle and carries the flavours of the spices.
Mustard flour
Adds a sharp, pungent bite and helps thicken the mixture.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil for 20 minutes. Boiling with vinegar and salt helps kill microorganisms and extracts spice flavour, while overheating can dull the sharp lemon and mustard notes.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, horseradish, mustard, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, horseradish, mustard, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace. 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.

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