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Lemon Pickle

A preserved lemon mixture of lemons, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Cut the lemons into quarters and remove all the seeds.

  2. Place the lemons in a jar and sprinkle with the coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover the jar with a cloth and plate, and let it stand for three days.

Add the spices and vinegar

  1. Add the cloves, mace, garlic or shallot, bruised mustard seed, and sliced nutmeg.

  2. Boil the vinegar and pour it over the ingredients in the jar.

  3. Cover the jar and, in three or four days, seal it with a bung and tie leather over it.

  4. It will be ready to use in a week and enhances most sauces, especially fish sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Garlic + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 juice that the pickle is built on.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve them during the standing period.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the lemons and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Mustard seed
Adds a pungent, sharp flavour that deepens as the pickle matures.

The step that matters

Sealing the jar after the vinegar is added. Vinegar and salt together preserve the lemons, but the jar must be covered tightly so the contents stay sealed and do not spoil while they mature.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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