Home › Pickle Recipes › Lemon Pickle
Lemon Pickle
12 large lemons. 1/2 cupful salt. 8 garlic cloves. 1 tablespoonful powdered mace 1 tablespoonful grated nutmeg 1 tablespoonful powdered allspice 1 teaspoonful red pepper 4 heaping tablespoonfuls mustard 1½ gallon vinegar Wash and dry the lemons, and cut each one into eight pieces. Place them in an earthenware pan with the salt, garlic, mace, nutmeg, red pepper, allspice, and mustard; add the vinegar, and bring the pickle gradually to the boil.
Simmer for half an hour, then pour it into a large stoneware jar, and stir it daily for a month, after which time place it in small glass jars and cover securely.
A spiced vinegar pickle of the old English store-cupboard type, meant to be made in bulk and drawn on for months. The printed ingredient list here is truncated — the lemons, salt and garlic are named in the method but their quantities are missing — so treat the spice and vinegar figures as the skeleton of the recipe rather than the whole of it.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for lemons, salt and garlic, none of which appear with amounts in the surviving list. The salt is the variable that matters most and should be taken from a current tested recipe rather than guessed.
- Vinegar strength1½ gallons is 6 quarts. Use a vinegar of at least 5 percent acidity — standard distilled white or cider vinegar qualifies. Diluted or artisanal vinegars of unstated strength are what turn a keeping pickle into a spoiling one.
- VesselsAn earthenware pan and a stoneware jar are specified for a reason: hot spiced vinegar will pit aluminium, react with unlined copper and strip cast iron. Glass, glazed stoneware or stainless steel are the modern equivalents.
- "Red pepper" and mustardRed pepper here is cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chilli. The four heaping tablespoonfuls of mustard mean dry mustard powder; prepared table mustard will give a thin, vinegary result and its own added acid.
- Mace and nutmegMace is the lacy aril of the nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than the seed. Both lose their volatile oils fast once ground, so grate the nutmeg fresh and buy mace in small quantity — a tablespoon of stale powder contributes little beyond colour.
- The half-hour simmerThis is not about cooking the lemons soft. It is to dissolve the salt, hydrate the spices and drive the acid into the rind. Keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered, in a well-ventilated kitchen; boiling spiced vinegar hard is unpleasant to stand over.
- The month of stirringThe daily stir is the working part of the recipe. It redistributes the settling mustard and spice and, more importantly, keeps every piece of lemon under the vinegar. Anything that sits proud of the liquid will mould. Cover the crock with a cloth or loose lid, not an airtight seal, while it matures.
- What it should taste likeAfter a month the rind will be soft and translucent and the pith will have lost most of its bitterness. Bottled young it is harsh and gritty with raw mustard; the time is not optional.
- Yield and useIt was used a spoonful at a time to sharpen gravies, fish sauces and made dishes, not eaten as a relish by the plateful. Refrigerate the jar in use.
Lemon pickle was a fixture of English kitchens from the mid-eighteenth century onward, appearing in Hannah Glasse and her successors. It belongs to the British habit of keeping a shelf of sharp, spiced "store sauces" — mushroom ketchup, walnut catsup, essence of anchovy — to correct a dull sauce or gravy in an age before commercial condiments. That is why the spicing runs so heavy on mace, nutmeg and mustard rather than on chilli: it is built to be used by the spoonful as a seasoning, not spread on bread.