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To Make Lemon Pickle

A preserved lemon condiment made with salt, spices, and 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 Make Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

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

  2. Rub the salt evenly over the lemons and spread them on a large pewter dish.

Dry the lemons

  1. Place the dish in a cool oven.

  2. Let the lemons dry gradually by the fire until the juice is absorbed by the peels.

  3. Transfer the dried lemons to a well-glazed pitcher.

Pickle and rest

  1. Add the mace, ground cloves, sliced nutmeg, peeled garlic, and crushed mustard seeds.

  2. Pour the boiling white wine vinegar over the mixture, seal the pitcher tightly, and let it stand for five or 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 and acidic juice that is drawn out and softened in the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons, concentrating flavor and helping preserve them.
White wine vinegar
Acts as the preserving liquid, adding sharpness and extracting flavor from the spices.
Mustard seeds
Add pungent, sharp flavor that deepens as the pickle stands.
Garlic
Adds savory pungency that mellows during the long steep in vinegar.

The step that matters

Drying the lemons gradually. Salted lemons must lose their juice slowly in gentle warmth; too much heat can cook or harden the peel, while too little leaves them wet and prone to spoiling in the vinegar.

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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