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Lemon Pickle or Catsup

A pickled lemon condiment made with salt, horseradish, shallots or garlic, vinegar, ginger, pepper, mace, and stored for months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lemon Pickle or Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Divide the lemons into quarters and remove all visible seeds.

  2. Sprinkle the salt over the lemons and let them sit for a week, turning occasionally.

  3. After a week, place the lemons in a stone jar with their liquid.

Make the pickle

  1. In a pot, simmer the vinegar with ginger, white pepper, and mace for 2-3 minutes.

  2. Pour the hot vinegar over the lemons in the jar.

Mature and store

  1. Let the pickle sit for 2-3 months before using, but it can be stored for up to 4-5 months before straining.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the main sour, aromatic flesh and peel that the pickle is built around.
Coarse sea salt
Draws liquid out of the lemons and helps preserve them during the initial salting.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that mellows as the pickle matures.
Vinegar
Acidifies the pickle and extracts flavour from the spices and aromatics.

The step that matters

Salting the lemons for a week. Salt draws moisture out of the lemons and softens them while it cures. Turning them keeps salt evenly distributed, so the pickle cures consistently instead of spoiling in patches.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, horseradish, shallot, vinegar, ginger, mace):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, horseradish, shallot, vinegar, ginger, 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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