Making a pretty pickle

They come in jars filled with spicy and sometimes sweet excitement. Pickles add zing to a meal, turning it into an absolute delight for the palate.

They are made with a wide variety of ingredients. Watermelons, orange rinds, onion seeds, curry leaf seeds, lotus stems, asparagus roots and green walnuts are some of the secrets of their exotic charm.

Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal, 34, a passionate cook and food writer, is a pickle lover. She traces her fascination to her childhood, her favourite pickle being one made of fresh turmeric and mango ginger powder (ambehalad), lime juice, salt, and slit green chillies, which, she says, is a good digestive.

“I have tasted a whole lot of pickles, from Turkish chilly pickle stuffed with vegetables and wrapped in greens to the Japanese umeboshi plum pickle to the gari, a sweet ginger pickle.”

Ghildiyal says she has also tried her hand at pickling meat, from mutton to wild boar. “In earlier times, all the leftover bits of game caught were made into pickles. I’ve tasted partridge pickle in Pathankhot.”

Kety Bomi Bhaka, 64, has been dishing up prawn and roe pickles for 10 years. A tradition passed down from her mother, she makes her roe pickle using eggs from the bhing fish, usually available in June and July.

The roe is cut into pieces, marinated in spices and sugarcane vinegar and added to a fried masala mixture. Bhaka’s prawn pickles are made with fresh tiger prawns, quite unlike the balchao, which is made with fine shrimps. “We have to have a fish accompaniment to our meals, which usually takes the place of fish pickle,” she says.

Jyoti Mehta, 55, has been churning out mouth-watering pickles
from her Juhu residence for 25 years. Her pickles are generally seasonal — made with fresh mangoes, amlas, carrots and other vegetables.

Her favourites are the gunda — hollowed out gumberry stuffed with a spicy masala and pickled — and the garmar — asparagus root pickle. “It is important to get the cooking right for both; else they become too soft and do not stay for long,” says Mehta.

The preservative she uses is mangoes soaked in water. The gunda or garmar is mixed in this tangy water with turmeric and a little rye. “This mixture is very useful if eaten when one has a cold or cough,” she says.

Making pickles has been a tradition with Marie Mendonca’s family for 40 years. She makes many non-vegetarian pickles, including a pork pickle. “It’s a spicy concoction that tastes great as a side dish,” she says.

The pickle stays for a month and is made by salting the meat, marinating it with spices, cooking it and finally storing it in oil. Mendonca also makes a pickle from fresh surmai, which is salted, sun-dried, marinated and fried.

Making the concoctions may be a bit of a pickle, but it should be a cakewalk for you if you are a chef worth your salt.