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Lemon Fickle

A preserved lemon pickle made with garlic, horseradish, spices, mustard flour, and vinegar, left to mature for six weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lemon Fickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the lemons and cut each into eight pieces.

  2. Sprinkle the salt over the lemon pieces.

  3. Add garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and Cayenne pepper.

  4. Stir in the mustard flour and pour in the vinegar.

Cook and steep

  1. Boil for 15 minutes in a well-tinned saucepan or in a jar placed in boiling water.

  2. Set the jar aside and stir daily for six weeks, keeping it covered.

  3. After six weeks, bottle the mixture.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the sour citrus base and most of the pickle's acidity and flavour.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the lemon pieces and helps preserve the mixture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the pickle and sharpens its flavour.
Mustard flour
Adds pungent heat and a sharp mustard flavour to the pickle.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows during long steeping.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 minutes in a well-tinned saucepan or in a jar placed in boiling water.. Gentle, even heating helps the mixture become safely preserved and stable; a reactive or untinned pan can taint the flavour and colour.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, clove, garlic, horseradish, nutmeg, pepper, mustard. 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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