Name: Lemon Pickle
Ingredients: 1 gallon best white wine vinegar; 1 teaspoon mace, beaten; 1 teaspoon cloves, beaten; 1 teaspoon nutmeg, beaten; 1 ounce ginger, sliced; 2 heads of garlic, chopped fine; ½ pint best Durham mustard

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Gather plums just before they ripen, discarding any bruised or unsound ones.
Soak the plums in a saltwater solution that can float an egg for three days.
Remove the plums, wipe them carefully, and place them in jars.
Boil and skim the vinegar mixture, then pour it over the plums when cold.
Fill the jars to the top and seal them with bladder and leather.
Let them sit for twelve months for best flavor.

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.

Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,038 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,324 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,053 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, vinegar, clove, nutmeg, ginger, garlic, mustard):

Allspicefits better
Cinnamonfits better
Cardamomfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, vinegar, clove, nutmeg, ginger, garlic, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.