Skip to main content
Main

Lemon Mangoes

A pickled lemon recipe using salt, water, mustard seed, chilies, horseradish, shallots, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and horseradish 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 Mangoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Cut a circular piece of rind from the blossom end of each lemon.

  2. Scoop out the pulp and skin using a teaspoon handle. Rinse the insides until the water runs clear.

Brine

  1. Soak the lemons in brine made with ½ pound of salt and 2 quarts of water, stirring often.

  2. After 3 days, change the brine and soak for another 3 days.

Fill and finish

  1. Drain the lemons and fill them with mustard seed, chilies, horseradish, shallots, and ginger.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the fruit and rind that soften and turn tender during the long brine soak.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the lemons and preserves them, seasoning them throughout.
Mustard seed
Adds pungent, sharp flavour to the filling as the lemons cure.
Small chilies
Add heat that mellows and infuses the lemons during curing.
Young scraped horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat to the filled lemons.

The step that matters

Changing the brine after 3 days. Salt is drawn out of the brine as it soaks into the lemons and the brine becomes diluted and cloudy with fruit juice. Replacing it restores the salt concentration needed to preserve the lemons safely through the full curing period.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, mustard, horseradish, shallot. 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.

More pickled lemons recipes

and Limes 6 See all 65 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHorseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce17 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes