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To Male Lemon Pickle

A preserved lemon pickle made by grating lemons, salting, adding spices, and curing in boiling white wine vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Male Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Grate the outer rind of the lemons thinly and cut them into quarters, leaving the bottoms whole.

  2. Rub the salt evenly over the lemons and place them in a large dish.

  3. Let the lemons dry gradually by the fire or in a cool place until all the juice is absorbed.

Pickle

  1. Transfer the lemons to a pitcher and add mace, cloves, nutmeg, garlic, and bruised mustard seeds in a muslin bag.

  2. Pour boiling white wine vinegar over the lemons, seal the pitcher, and let it sit by the fire for five to six days.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  4. Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Mace + clovetop 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 body, acidic juice and aromatic rind of the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out juice from the lemons and helps preserve them.
White wine vinegar
Acid that preserves the lemons and carries the spice flavours into the pickle.
Garlic
Adds pungent flavour that mellows during the long steeping.
Mustard seeds
Contribute a sharp, pungent flavour as they steep in the vinegar.

The step that matters

Drying the salted lemons until all juice is absorbed. Salt draws juice out of the lemons; if they are not dried long enough, excess liquid dilutes the vinegar and weakens preservation and texture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, clove, nutmeg, garlic, mustard, white wine, vinegar. 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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