Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pickled Lemons
Pickled Lemons
Wipe two dozen or so of lemons, rub them well with salt, put them in a bowl, cover with more salt, and allow them to remain for four or five days, turning occasionally. Take them out to dry on a sieve in the sun, and pack in jars, sprinkling over evenly two ounces each of bruised white ginger and white peppers, one-fourth ounce red peppers, and one-half ounce each of coriander and mustard seeds. Pour over enough vinegar to cover, let them remain for three weeks, then add enough vinegar to make up for the quantity absorbed, tie down, and the pickle will be ready for use in six weeks, though if left for six months it will be much better.
This is a salt-cure followed by a vinegar pickle, closer to a North African preserved lemon than to anything sweet. The whole thing works because the fruit spends days in dry salt before it ever meets vinegar, so nothing here should be rushed.
- Buy unwaxed lemonsSupermarket lemons are almost always coated in food-grade wax, which blocks the salt and traps residue under the peel. Look for unwaxed or organic fruit, and scrub anything else in hot water before wiping dry.
- The salt quantity is open-endedOscar says only "cover with more salt." For two dozen lemons expect to use 2 to 3 lb of coarse salt — enough that every fruit sits buried and the brine that draws out keeps them submerged. Use kosher or pickling salt; iodised table salt can darken the peel.
- White ginger and white peppers"White ginger" is peeled dried ginger root, sold in whole pieces at spice shops or Chinese groceries; bruise it with the flat of a knife rather than grinding it. "White peppers" here means whole white peppercorns, and the quarter ounce of red peppers means small dried hot chillies, weighed rather than measured by spoon.
- Drying without sunThe sieve presumably lets the drawn brine run off and the skins firm, rather than truly dehydrating the fruit. A rack in a warm airy room for a day, or a couple of hours in an oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, is a reasonable substitute.
- Vinegar strength mattersUse a straight 5 per cent distilled white or cider vinegar and do not dilute it. This pickle keeps on acidity plus salt, and the lemons will absorb a surprising amount in the first three weeks, which is why the recipe tells you to top it up.
- "Tie down"Period jars were sealed with a bladder or paper cover tied over the mouth. A modern glass jar with a plastic or plastic-lined lid is better; bare metal will corrode. Keep everything under the vinegar and store in a cool dark cupboard.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no yield; two dozen whole lemons plus vinegar to cover will need several large jars. Rinse a wedge before using, discard most of the pulp, and chop the rind into lamb, chicken, rice or a vinaigrette. A little goes a long way — this is far saltier and sharper than a lemon.
- Scale it downThere is no reason to commit to two dozen. Six lemons with a quarter of the spice mix behaves identically and fits one large jar.
Salting whole lemons is one of the oldest ways of keeping citrus, documented in Arabic and Persian cookery long before it reached English kitchens, and it is often said to have arrived in Anglo-American cookbooks through the eighteenth-century taste for "Indian" pickles and mangoes — the ginger, coriander, mustard seed and red pepper here are usually taken as the spice signature of that borrowing. Oscar Tschirky's book was published in 1896, when the Waldorf's kitchen was running a French menu for an American clientele. That a hotel chef bothered to print a pickle needing six weeks minimum, and six months for preference, is a reminder of how much of a large kitchen's work happened months ahead of service.