Skip to main content
Main

Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon made by boiling lemons with salt, garlic, horseradish, spices, mustard flour, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Combine the lemons with salt, garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cayenne, and mustard flour in a large jar. Pour in the vinegar and mix well.

Heat

  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. Alternatively, set the jar on a hot hearth until done.

Age and bottle

  1. Cover the jar and stir it daily for six weeks.

  2. After six weeks, 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 flavour and acidic pulp that the pickle is built around.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, adding sharpness and preserving the lemon pieces.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and deepens during the long steeping.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that infuses into the vinegar over time.
Mustard flour
Adds sharp, pungent flavour and helps give the pickle its characteristic bite.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture. Boiling or gently heating the lemons, spices and vinegar helps extract flavour and soften the fruit. Using a well-tinned pan avoids metallic off-flavours from acidic liquid.

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.

You might also like

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