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Lime Kussoondee

A pickled lime condiment made with tamarind, sugar, spices, and mustard oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Tamarind and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 133 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Lime Kussoondee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the limes

  1. Pick 25 limes with a fork and cover each with coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the limes in the sun for 3 days until brown and soft.

  3. Add the salted limes to a wide-mouthed bottle without wiping off the salt.

  4. Squeeze the juice of 30 limes into the bottle until it is three-quarters full.

  5. Fill the rest of the bottle with vinegar.

  6. Let the mixture stand for 2-3 days.

  7. Remove the lime juice and vinegar from the mixture.

  8. Add ½ cup vinegar and 4 tablespoons sugar to the mixture.

  9. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

  10. While hot, pour the mixture over the limes.

  11. Let the mixture stand for a week until the limes are soft.

Prepare the spices and tamarind

  1. Grind the dry chillies, mustard seed, ginger, salt, and garlic in vinegar.

  2. Set aside the ground mixture.

  3. Pick the tamarind.

  4. Clean the tamarind.

  5. Soak the tamarind in vinegar.

  6. Strain the tamarind through a clean cloth.

  7. Mix the ground spices with sugar in a large dish.

Combine and bottle

  1. Combine the spice-sugar mixture with the lime mixture.

  2. Add ½ bottle of mustard oil.

  3. Cut each lime into 4 parts.

  4. Layer the limes and mixed spices alternately in the bottle, about 1 inch thick.

  5. Cover the top with mustard oil.

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. Tamarind + limetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together133 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

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

  3. Tamarind + gingertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Tamarind + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + garlictop 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

What each ingredient does

Limes
Salting and soaking softens the rind and draws out juice that gives the pickle its sour base.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture from the limes and acts as a preservative during the salting stage.
Dry chillies
Provide heat and colour once ground into the spice paste.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavour and is ground into the spice paste.
Mustard oil
Forms a protective layer over the top and adds its own pungent flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sourness of the limes and vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the lime mixture while hot. Boiling the vinegar and sugar mixture and pouring it hot over the limes helps soften the rind and reduces the risk of spoilage from microbes that survive in cold preserves.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tamarind, sugar, mustard, ginger, lime, vinegar):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tamarind, sugar, mustard, ginger, lime, 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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