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Lemon Pickle

A pickled lemon dish with salt, turmeric, garlic, shallots, vinegar, ginger, peppercorns, mustard seed, and chile sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turmeric and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,776 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Lemon Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Wash and dry the lemons, then cut four lengthwise incisions and one around the middle of each lemon.

  2. Fill the incisions with coarse sea salt and place the lemons in an earthen pan in a sunny spot for a week, turning them daily.

  3. Sprinkle turmeric over the lemons and divide them into quarters before placing them in a jar.

Pack the jar

  1. Add garlic cloves and shallots to the jar.

  2. In a pot, boil the vinegar with ginger, black peppercorns, and mustard seed for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Pour the hot vinegar over the lemons and let them sit until the next day.

  4. Add chile sauce, then seal in quart jars or cover with a bladder.

  5. The longer they are kept, the better they will taste.

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. Turmeric + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Turmeric + shallottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together282 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Turmeric + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Salted and cured over a week, they supply the sour, aromatic base of the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve them during curing.
White vinegar
Acidity that preserves the pickle and sharpens its flavor.
Turmeric
Gives the pickle its characteristic golden color and earthy flavor.
Shallots
Add mild onion sweetness and aroma that mellow during keeping.
Mustard seed
Adds pungent, sharp flavor that infuses into the hot vinegar.

The step that matters

Salting and sunning the lemons. Salt must fully penetrate the incisions and the lemons must be turned daily so the salt draws out moisture and the rind softens evenly. Uneven salting leaves pockets that spoil or stay bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turmeric, garlic, clove, shallot, vinegar, ginger, 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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