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Lemon, Pickled
Take a dozen fresh sound lemons, small, and with thick rinds. Rub them with a piece of flannel, and slit them down in four quarters through the rind only, without breaking the fruit. Fill the openings with salt, pressed hard in, and set them upright in a deep pan, which must be put in a warm place until the salt melts. Turn them three times a day, and baste them often in the liquor until they are tender. Drain this liquor from them, and put them into earthen jars. Boil the brine with two quarts of good vinegar, half a pound of bruised ginger, three ounces of black pepper, six ounces of mustard-seed, and an ounce of Jamaica pepper. Pour it, when boiling, upon the lemons, with an equal quantity of the seasoning in each jar, and when cool, cover with thick paper. The lemons must be kept well covered with vinegar, and as it evaporates more must be added. When the lemons are used the liquid will be useful in making fish and other sauces. This pickle will keep for years, but it ought to be kept twelve months before it is used. If wanted sooner, however, bake the lemons in a very cool oven for six or seven hours. The best time for making this pickle is from November to April. Time, ten days to melt the salt. Probable cost of lemons, 1d. each.
A vinegar-and-spice lemon pickle of the Anglo-Indian type, and one of the slowest things in the book: ten days of salting, then a year in the jar. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities and vessels want translating.
- The hinge: cut the rind onlyThe four slits must go through the peel and stop at the flesh, so the lemons stay whole and hold their shape through months of salting and steeping. Cut them into quarters and you get a jar of mush that clouds the liquor.
- Unwaxed lemonsThe flannel rub would have taken off grit and dust from unwaxed fruit. Modern supermarket lemons often carry a food-grade wax, which is best removed before salting: buy unwaxed, or scrub in hot water first. Small thick-skinned lemons still work best, as the rind is the point of the dish.
- Salt is unmeasuredThe original simply says to press salt hard into the openings; how much depends on the fruit, but an ounce or two of coarse salt per lemon is a reasonable guide, and it will draw its own brine over the ten days. Plain coarse or pickling salt is usually preferred to iodised table salt.
- "A warm place" and turningSomewhere gently warm rather than hot, well below a modern oven's lowest setting: a sunny windowsill or the top of a fridge is the sort of spot meant. The thrice-daily turning and basting is not optional: any rind sitting dry above the brine is where mould starts.
- Jamaica pepper and bruised gingerJamaica pepper is allspice, whole berries. Bruised ginger means whole dried ginger root smashed under a heavy pan, not ground; ground ginger will turn the liquor gritty. The black pepper should likewise be whole corns.
- "A very cool oven"For the quick version, use the lowest steady setting your oven will hold, for the six or seven hours stated. The recipe offers this only as a way of having the pickle ready sooner than the twelve months it otherwise wants.
- Vessels and coveringAn earthen jar sealed with thick paper depended on the vinegar for preservation, not on an airtight seal. Use glass jars with plastic or plastic-lined lids; bare metal will corrode and taint the pickle. Keep the lemons fully submerged and top up with fresh vinegar as the level drops.
- Scale and yieldTwelve lemons with two quarts of vinegar will fill roughly two to three quart jars. To scale down, a third of the recipe is four lemons to about a pint and a third of vinegar, with the spices reduced to match.
- Using itThe spiced liquor is the real prize, as the recipe says: a spoonful goes into fish sauces, gravies and dressings much as Worcestershire or a good vinegar would. The lemon quarters themselves are chopped fine and used sparingly, being intensely salty.
Lemon pickle of this kind was common in English kitchens from the mid eighteenth century onward, and both Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Raffald give versions, usually recommending the liquor as a store sauce. Its spicing -- ginger, mustard seed, black pepper and allspice -- is the standard English pickle cupboard of the period, and a connection with Indian lime and lemon pickles is sometimes suggested, though the English form has its own earlier pedigree and the link is not documented here. Cassell's inherits the store-sauce logic wholesale: the pickle is treated less as a relish than as a bottled seasoning for fish and made dishes, of a kind commercial bottled sauces were increasingly supplying by the time this book appeared. The note that November to April is the best season fits the winter arrival of imported lemons in British markets, and the costing at a penny a lemon is a reminder of how the page functioned; readers of Cassell's expected to be told what a store cupboard project would set them back before they committed a year of shelf space to it.