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Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon preserved 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 ↓

Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Combine the lemons, salt, garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, Cayenne, and mustard flour in a large jar.

  3. 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.

Steep and bottle

  1. Set the jar aside and stir it daily for six weeks, keeping it tightly covered.

  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
Supply the sour citrus flavour and most of the pickle's bulk.
Sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and preserves the pickle through its long steeping.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the pickle and softens the lemon pieces over time.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows during the weeks of steeping.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that carries through the vinegar.
Mustard flour
Adds sharp, pungent flavour and helps the pickle's savoury tang.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture for 15 minutes. Heating the mixture in vinegar helps extract flavour from the spices and aids preservation. Heating in a reactive or poorly tinned pan can taint the flavour, which is why a well-tinned saucepan or a jar in boiling water is specified.

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.

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