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Lemon Pickle

A pickled condiment made from lemons, salt, 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 Pickle

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. In a large bowl, combine the lemon pieces with salt, garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cayenne, and mustard flour.

  3. Pour in the vinegar and mix well.

Cook and cure

  1. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes in a well‑tinned saucepan or in a strong jar placed in a kettle of boiling water.

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

  3. Once ready, 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
Provide the main body and sour citrus flavour of the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve the pickle.
Vinegar
Acidic liquid that preserves the mixture and sharpens its flavour.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat that mellows during the long curing.
Mustard flour
Contributes a sharp, pungent bite to the pickle.

The step that matters

Keeping the jar tightly covered while it cures. Vinegar and salt only preserve well when the mixture stays sealed; air exposure invites spoilage and dries out the lemons over the six weeks of daily stirring.

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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