Take your ‘pick’le!

India’s myriad pickles make every bottle the perfect piece of culture to savour and enjoy as a food souvenir, writes Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Everybody loves a good souvenir from their trips, and I am no different that way. I will bring home magnets for the refrigerator and some curios to go in the showcase. But what I never miss out on is bringing home a food souvenir — and especially when travelling in India, that for me is always a pickle. It lasts long and is a great way to recall some wonderful food memories.

Every state and community in India has a wide range of pickles and ways of pickling. Starting in the South, the folks of Mangaluru, for example, like many other parts, love to brine their produce. You will find stores with large bottles filled with everything from pineapples and hog plums to green mangoes, limes, chillies, star fruit, and bimblis, all packed tightly in saline water. Even a simple meal of ganji (rice gruel) instantly becomes a feast with just one bit of this salted goodness. Another interesting pickle from the Mangalorean Catholic community is the kosrache lonche — a minced raw mango pickle. The mango goes through several processes with a salt and vinegar solution to extract moisture and aid pickling. Finely chopped green chillies, ginger, and garlic are added in and the mix is tempered with sesame oil. Mangaluru is also well known for its seafood, meat and poultry pickles, besides its many vegetable versions.

Continuing further down the coastline, Kerala has several seafood and meat pickles — their beef pickle with masala or finely shredded and dry ones are equally wonderful to have in your cupboard. And going up the coast, Goa makes some great shrimp balchao, a pickle that is used to preserve the goodness of seafood for the rainy season. What gives this pickle its unique sweet-tangy flavour includes the different kinds of vinegar that are used in its making, like red wine vinegar, toddy vinegar, and coconut vinegar.

Going inland a bit, the Tibetan colony in Kushalnagar on the way to Coorg has several stores that sell local foodstuff. One thing you will find here is the extremely fiery meat pickles. Strips of chicken or pork are fried down to almost a rubbery, jerky-like texture and then pounded with red chillies. The mixture reaches a point where it’s hard to tell if there is anything beyond chillies in it. But, even a tiny teaspoon is enough to liven up anything you eat.

Coorg is well known for its use of bamboo shoots, and besides including it in their cooking, it is often pickled as well. Baimbale Paara can be in versions that are brined or made with masalas, vinegar, and sesame oil. These can be dry pickles or those with some gravy.

If you wind up way up north, Rajasthan, owing to the largely hot and dry weather conditions, has mastered the art of pickling just about anything, and therefore pickle shops in the state can be a veritable candyland! Pickles of citron, garlic, dried mango, ker (a local berry that grows in desert climates), dates, turmeric root, rose petals, and so much more will have you making some tough choices on what to buy and what to leave on your wish list!

Going further north, Punjab has a lot of fiery pickles, especially the stuffed green and red chillies, but it’s the khatta-meetha nimbu achaar that is much loved. Usually made with lemons that have a harder peel (often from trees within family homes), pieces are mixed with carom seeds, khand (powdered jaggery), black salt, and table salt. Mustard oil is then smoked and poured over the mixture, which is then dried in the sun. A warm ghee-laden chapati with a bit of this pickle is bliss.

And still further into the mountains in the Uttarakhand region, Fiddlehead Ferns go by the Indian names of Linguda (Garhwal region), Limbra (Kumaon), Dhekia Xaak (Assam), Therme Thoppu (Coorg), and more.

A seasonal green, this is usually foraged in the months of April to June. These greens have to be carefully processed. The fibres around it have to be wiped away thoroughly, the smaller stalks removed (can be used to make a side dish), and only the hardened portions of the fern are used for the pickle. It is chopped and then boiled in turmeric water, drained, dried, and tossed with a powdered mix of methi, ajwain, saunf, and mustard seeds. It is finished with black salt, salt, red chilli powder, and mustard oil.

This pickle has a bite to it and is a great accompaniment to any meal. The Mountain Garlic pickle of the region is made with the usual pickling ingredients of whole spices and oil but tends to be sweeter, owing to the general flavour profile of garlic grown in hilly regions.

Towards the north-east, in the markets of Arunachal Pradesh, like the one in Namsai, you will find plastic jars filled with large preserved lemons. These are believed to have medicinal properties. They are simple to make — large lemons, kept whole, are washed, dried, placed in a jar with salt and then sun-dried for a week or so. The jar is shaken occasionally to mix the ingredients well and to soften the lemon peel. These can be quite bitter, but then, aren’t most medicines known to be?

Interestingly, lemon pickles are believed to have medicinal properties, and you will find homes that zealously guard and sparingly use pickles as old as 75 years! I have had the pleasure of tasting a 25-year-old lemon pickle (which was unfortunately not for sale, so I satisfied myself with a four-year-old one). The salt levels are quite high, and it drains your mouth of moisture, but a bit mixed into your chapati dough or some in curd rice is said to do wonders for your stomach’s health.

These are just some of the pickles that fill my cupboard from my travels. To me, they are reminders of some wonderful trips and a taste of some great meals through them all.