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Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon condiment made with salt, garlic, horseradish, spices, mustard powder, and vinegar.

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 Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. In a large bowl, combine the lemons with salt, garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cayenne, and mustard powder. Pour in the vinegar and mix well.

Heat and rest

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

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

Bottle

  1. After six weeks, transfer the pickle into small bottles.

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
Supply the sharp acidic juice and peel that flavour the pickle.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve the mixture.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the pickle and sharpens its flavour.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury depth to the pickle.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the long steeping.
Mustard powder
Contributes sharp pungency and helps season the pickle.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture in a well-tinned saucepan. Boiling heats the spices and acid together so their flavours blend and the mixture is sterilised. Using a well-tinned pan matters because bare copper or unlined metal can react with the acid and taint the pickle.

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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