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Dessert

Lemon Pickle

A preserved lemon mixture flavored with spices and vinegar, left to mature for several months.

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 ↓

Lemon Pickle

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

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

  2. Rub the salt onto the lemons and spread them on a large dish.

  3. Place the dish in a cool oven.

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

Pickle

  1. Transfer the lemons to a well-glazed pitcher.

  2. Add mace, cloves, nutmeg, garlic, and mustard seed in a muslin bag.

  3. Pour the boiling vinegar over the lemons.

  4. Seal the pitcher.

  5. Let it sit by the fire for 5-6 days, shaking daily.

Strain and bottle

  1. After 3 months, strain the mixture through a sieve to separate the liquid from the solids.

  2. Let the liquid stand for a few days to refine.

  3. Bottle it.

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 flavour and aromatic oils, with rind and juice both infusing the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture from the lemons and helps preserve them.
White wine vinegar
Acidic liquid that preserves the lemons and carries the spice flavours.
Mustard seed
Adds pungent, sharp flavour to the pickling liquid.
Garlic
Adds savoury pungency that mellows during the long steep.

The step that matters

Drying the salted lemons. The lemons must dry gradually until the juice is absorbed. Salt draws moisture out, and if lemons stay wet they can spoil or dilute the vinegar, so the drying should be slow and complete before the vinegar is added.

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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