Home › Cookery › Pickling Fifty Lemons
Pickling Fifty Lemons
Grate off the yellow rind, cut off the end, and pack in salt for eight days. Set them in a hot oven, in dishes; turning until the salt candies on them. Place them in a pot and pour on two gallons vinegar (boiling) to which has been added two pounds white mustard-seed, two tablespoonfuls mace, one pound ginger, four tablespoonfuls celery-seed, one pound black pepper, two pounds sugar, one handful horseradish scraped.
All the spices, except mustard-seed, must be pulverized.--Mrs. H. P. C.
A nineteenth-century keeping pickle built for a pantry, not a jar in the door of the refrigerator. The proportions are enormous and the spicing is far heavier than modern palates expect, so read the ratios before you commit fifty lemons to salt.
- Scale it down firstFifty lemons to two gallons of vinegar works out to roughly one lemon per 5 fl oz vinegar. A tenth batch — five lemons, about 3 1/4 cups vinegar, and a tenth of each spice — is the sensible way to test it.
- The eight days in salt is the hingeDry-salting draws water out of the peel and is what makes the fruit keep. Use coarse or pickling salt, not iodized table salt, and pour off the brine that collects rather than letting the fruit sit in it.
- "A hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature; period usage for a hot oven is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 400–450F. The purpose is to dry the salted fruit until the surface crusts, not to bake it; watch closely, as lemon skin scorches quickly at that heat, and turn as instructed.
- One pound of black pepperThat is not a misprint for the era, but it will produce something closer to a seasoning condiment than a pickle to eat by the slice. Anyone scaling down should consider cutting the pepper and ginger by half and tasting.
- Ginger and mace"One pound ginger" is almost certainly dried root rather than fresh, since the spices are to be pulverized; buy whole dried ginger and grind it, or substitute ground ginger by weight. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, milder and more floral — nutmeg is the nearest substitute, used a little more sparingly.
- White mustard-seed stays wholeThe instruction to pulverize everything except the mustard-seed is deliberate. Whole yellow mustard seed swells and stays crunchy in the vinegar; ground mustard would cloud and thicken the liquid.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labeled 5 percent acidity. Some period vinegars were weaker and some much stronger, and the keeping quality of this pickle depends entirely on the acid.
- Storage and useThe recipe gives no sealing directions. Pack into clean jars, cover the fruit completely with the hot spiced vinegar, and keep refrigerated; treat it as a condiment for cold meat, fish and curries rather than a shelf-stable canned good.
- Save the grated rindThe yellow zest removed at the start is the most aromatic part of the lemon. Dry it or beat it into sugar rather than discarding it.
Lemon pickle was a standard English store-cupboard preparation well before it reached Virginia — eighteenth-century cookbooks such as Hannah Glasse's treat it almost as a bottled sauce, a spoonful stirred into gravies and fish sauces the way one would later reach for Worcestershire. The heavy load of mustard, ginger, mace and pepper has often been linked to the taste for lemon and lime pickles associated with East India Company households, though the connection is more suggestion than established fact, and the technique of salting citrus for days before spicing it invites comparison with North African salt-preserved lemons. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), a compilation of contributed receipts credited only by initials, says something about scale in a Southern household kitchen: fifty lemons and two gallons of vinegar, with eight days in salt before the fruit ever reached the oven.