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Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon prepared by quartering lemons, salting, and adding cloves and mace after three days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Lemon Pickle

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the lemons

  1. Cut the lemons into quarters and remove all the seeds.

  2. Place the lemon quarters in a jar and sprinkle with the coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover the jar with a cloth and a plate.

Rest and spice

  1. Let it sit for three days.

  2. After three days, add a few cloves and the mace.

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 + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lemon + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Their acidic juice and peel soften and flavour the pickle as it matures.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve them during pickling.
Cloves
Add sharp, aromatic spice notes to the finished pickle.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the lemons.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, mace):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, mace. 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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