Skip to main content
Drink

Lemon Pickle

A preserved lemon mixture made with salt, spices, vinegar, and garlic, steeped for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the lemons

  1. Peel the lemons and cut them into quarters.

  2. Place the lemon quarters in a dish and sprinkle with salt.

  3. Turn the lemon quarters daily for a week.

Make the pickle

  1. Transfer the lemons to a stone jar.

  2. Add garlic, horseradish, cloves, mace, nutmeg, cayenne, mustard seeds, and vinegar to the jar.

  3. Cover the jar and place it in a pan of boiling water.

  4. Boil for 10 minutes.

  5. Set the jar in a warm place to simmer gently for 2 hours.

Mature and bottle

  1. Keep the jar covered, stirring daily for 6 weeks.

  2. After 6 weeks, strain the mixture.

  3. Bottle the strained mixture for use.

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
Provide the main body of the pickle and its sour, bright flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the lemons and helps preserve them.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the lemons and sharpens the overall flavour.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury depth to the pickle.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that mellows during long steeping.
Mustard seeds
Add a sharp, pungent flavour that infuses into the vinegar.

The step that matters

Keeping the jar covered during the 6-week stirring. Covering the jar limits evaporation and exposure to air, keeping the vinegar concentration and aromatics steady while the lemons soften and infuse. Uncovered, the liquid can concentrate or spoil.

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.

You might also like

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesSugar VinegarSugar Vinegar20 recipes