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Pickled Lemons

A preserved lemon dish made by salting, brining, and pickling lemons with vinegar, spices, mustard seed, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Lemons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Rub the lemons with a piece of flannel.

  2. Slit each lemon halfway down into four quarters without cutting through to the pulp.

  3. Stuff the slits with salt and set the lemons upright in a pan for 4-5 days until the salt melts.

  4. Turn the lemons thrice a day in their own liquid until tender.

Make the pickle

  1. Make enough pickle to cover the lemons using vinegar, lemon brine, Jamaica pepper, and ginger.

  2. Boil and skim the pickle.

Pickle and store

  1. When cold, pour the pickle over the lemons along with mustard seed and garlic.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide the main fruit body, sourness and aromatic peel that softens during pickling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons, softening the peel and helping preserve them.
Rape vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the pickle.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows as the lemons pickle.

The step that matters

Let the pickle cool before pouring it over the lemons. Pouring hot pickle over the lemons can partly cook them and soften them unevenly. Waiting until the pickle is cold keeps the lemons intact and lets the brine cover them evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, pepper, ginger, mustard, clove, garlic):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, ginger, mustard, clove, garlic. 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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