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Lemon Mangoes

A pickled lemon recipe with mustard seed, chilies, horseradish, shallots, ginger, white peppercorns, mace, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Cut a circular slice from the blossom end of each lemon and scoop out the pulp and skin with a teaspoon.

  2. Rinse the insides of the lemon rinds until the water runs clear.

Brine

  1. Soak the rinds in a brine made with ½ pound of salt and 2 quarts of water, stirring often for 3 days.

  2. Change the brine and soak for an additional 3 days.

Fill and pickle

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

  2. Sew the cut pieces back onto the lemons and place them in a stone jar.

  3. Pour the boiling pickle made from the lemon juice, vinegar, salt, ginger, white peppercorns, and mace over the lemons.

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 main body and acidic juice that the pickle is built around.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the rinds and seasons them during the long brine soak.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent flavor to the filling as the lemons cure.
Vinegar
Adds acidity to the boiling pickle, helping preserve the lemons and sharpen their flavor.

The step that matters

Changing the brine and soaking for the full 6 days. The rinds must cure long enough for salt to draw out bitterness and soften them; a fresh brine keeps the salt concentration strong so the cure works evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

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