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Another Way to Make Lemon Pickle

A preserved condiment made by pickling sliced lemons with salt, spices, 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 ↓

Another Way to Make Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemons and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add the salt, horseradish, mustard flour, white pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Pound the spices together and mix with the vinegar.

Cook and steep

  1. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

  2. Transfer to a jar and let it sit for 3 weeks, stirring daily.

Strain and store

  1. Strain through a sieve and store in 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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  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
Supply the main citrus flavor and acidity that define the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the lemons during the long steeping.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the mixture and carries the spice flavors.
Horseradish
Adds sharp pungency that mellows as the pickle steeps.
Mustard flour
Contributes sharp, pungent mustard flavor and some body to the liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring daily during the 3-week steep. Regular stirring keeps the lemon slices and spices evenly in contact with the vinegar and salt, so flavor extracts uniformly and no part of the mixture is left unsoaked or spoiling at the surface.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, horseradish, mustard, flour, clove, nutmeg, mace):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, horseradish, mustard, flour, clove, nutmeg, 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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