Name: Lemon Ketchup, or Pickle
Ingredients: 3 large juicy lemons; Salt; 1 quart vinegar; ¼ pound anchovies (without bones and scales); 4 blades of mace; ½ nutmeg, sliced; 1 tablespoon white pepper

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Lemon Ketchup, or Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

Cut the tops off the lemons and stuff them with salt.
Set the lemons upright in a dish before the fire, turning them every day.
When they become dry, roast them in a Dutch oven until brown.

Make the pickle

Boil the vinegar with the anchovies, mace, nutmeg, and white pepper for 10 minutes.
Pour the boiling mixture over the lemons in a stone jar and cover tightly.
Let it stand for six weeks, then transfer to quarter-pint flat 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.

Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,695 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).
Nutmeg + white peppertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,375 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lemon + white peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,658 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 sour citrus flavour of the pickle.
Vinegar: Acts as the preserving liquid that softens and carries the flavours of the lemons.
Anchovies: Add a deep savoury, salty richness to the pickle.
Mace: Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the boiled liquid.
Nutmeg: Adds a warm, sweet aromatic note to the pickling liquid.
White pepper: Adds gentle, sharp heat that rounds out the spiced liquid.

The step that matters

Roasting the dried lemons until brown. Browning them in a hot Dutch oven develops deeper, toasty flavours through the Maillard reaction. Over-roasting can make them bitter or burnt, so watch them closely as they darken.

Swap the white pepper

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

Allspicefits better
Cinnamonfits better
Marjoramfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, vinegar, mace, nutmeg. 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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Lemon Ketchup, or Pickle