by Tom Stobart
Poha Preserve
Make a thick syrup by boiling together 675 g (1½ lb) of sugar and 225 ml (8 fl oz) of water, a stick of cinnamon and a sliced lemon for about 10 minutes. Add 1 It (1¾ pt) of ground cherries and boil until they become clear. Leave to cool overnight. Next day bring to the boil and bottle.
Tomatillo, jamberry or tomate verde. Native to Mexico, the tomatillo (P. ixocarpa) was used by the Aztecs. The berry is larger than the other Physalis fruits and completely fills the lantern, so that it seems to be in a husk. When ripe, the fruits are variously coloured, depending on the variety, but they generally look like small green tomatoes. In fact, tomatillo means small tomato in Spanish. The tomatillo is rather flavourless unless boiled for a few minutes. Its particular culinary importance – though it is used for jams, and for chutneys in India – lies in its being an essential ingredient in guacamole (a purée of avocado pear with chilli and other seasonings), as made in the north of Mexico where the fruit is often called tomate con cascar (with husk). Canned tomatillos are available as well as the canned salsa de tomatillo. The canned fruits, when used in guacamole, require no further cooking.
PICCALILLI. See pickles.
PICKLED FISH. See caveach.
PICKEREL. See pike.
PICKLES and PICKLING. Pickling is an old method of preserving food by immersing it in brine or vinegar. Pickle is a word with wonderful spelling variations in Middle English, and it will only take a marketing man to notice this for us to be faced with jars of ‘Ye Olde Pekille, Pykyl, Pekkyll or Pykulle.’ Preservation depends on the sensitivity of putrefactive organisms to salt and acetic acid, and occasionally to other acids and spices. Although meat curers call the brines they use ‘pickle’, popular usage restricts pickles to foods, usually vegetables and fruit (but sometimes meat and fish) preserved in various ways and used as a relish. Pickles are made by traditional methods all over the world, from Korean and Chinese pickled cabbage to British pickled walnuts. Pickles also include what the Americans call relishes and the English call *chutneys. The word covers a vast number of preparations and different techniques for making them, but there are some basic varieties and considerations which are dealt with below. In general, vegetables to be pickled must be firm and as fresh as possible. Acid or salt must be sufficiently concentrated to ensure that the pickle keeps. Pickles may or may not need the addition of garlic, herbs and spices, but of over-riding importance to their flavour is the critical balance between sourness, saltiness and sweetness.
Air, since it contains oxygen, is the enemy of pickles. It causes discolouration, encourages the growth of moulds and the degrading of vinegar by bacteria. It should be kept at bay by filling jars to the brim, dislodging bubbles and covering carefully. Pickle should always be held under the surface of the pickling liquid; vegetables being pickled in bulk should be weighed down with stones or boards.
*Alum is sometimes used in pickles to harden the vegetables. A piece the size of a bean will do for 4½ lt (4 qt) of vinegar, the amount is not critical and is usually given in the recipe. Although alum is harmful in large doses and is not favoured by the authorities, it has a low toxicity, so is all right in the small quantities needed in pickles. It has been used in food for hundreds of years.
*Brine. A 10% brine strength is commonly used for discouraging unwanted bacteria and for holding vegetables before pickling. This is particularly necessary when vegetables that crop at different seasons are eventually to be put together in a mixed pickle, such as piccalilli.
Colour. Pickles should look attractive, so colour is important. Reasons why pickles discolour include: a) leaving cut surfaces exposed to the air instead of dropping the vegetables into water and lemon juice as soon as they are cut; b) using hard water for brine; c) using brown vinegar, d) using ground spices and leaving spices in bottles. But it is more important that pickles should taste good than look good, and if you find it hard to make white pickles, the alternative is to colour them red with a slice of beetroot, as is often done in the Middle East. Turmeric turns pickles yellow, but adds its flavour.
Covering. Pickles must always be covered with liquid and the jar sealed to prevent evaporation. Pickles containing oil should remain under it, and a layer of oil can sometimes be used on top of pickles to help seal them. Jars with bare metal lids should be avoided, as a vinegar-salt mixture is very corrosive to metal.
Drying. Some ingredients are very watery; others, like capers, can gain in strength of flavour by being wilted in the sun before being pickled. When there is no sun, water may have to be removed by salting and squeezing. Watery pickles do not keep well, as the vinegar may become diluted by the juices below the critical level of acidity. Failing all else, it may be necessary to use extra salt or strong, distilled vinegar.
Dill pickles. Cucumbers preserved by a lactic-acid fermentation and flavoured with dill (or its oil) and usually some garlic are called dill pickles. This is one of the most popular types of pickle especially (with ethnic variations) in the US and Central and Eastern Europe.
Fermentation. Alcoholic fermentation can occasionally occur in sweet pickles or chutneys left open in hot weather, but is unimportant in this context compared to *lactic acid fermentation, which occurs in the making of dill pickles and sauerkraut. It is the reaction that takes place in silage, and is analogous to the souring of milk. The lactic acid acts as a preservative. Most of these pickles were originally devised in cool countries for keeping during cold winters, and they will not stand safely in hot climates, where they need to be packed in jars and sterilized. They should, in any case, always be kept in a cool place, such as a cellar.
*Garlic is pickled whole in Middle Eastern countries and has a rather startling flavour, but a clove or two is quite a normal part of pickling spices, and often improves the pickle.
*Gherkins. Tiny relatives of the cucumber.
Hardening. Vinegar tends to harden vegetables, and will delay softening when fruits, such as apples, are cooked in it when making chutney. If a pickle seems to be too soft, the next year try adding alum (see above).Tannin is another hardener, which is one reason why oak leaves or black-currant leaves are used in dill pickles in Poland and elsewhere.
Herbs and spices. The flavouring of many pickles may be traditional, but it is also often an individual matter. In commercial pickle-making, this is an area of closely-guarded secrets, and mixtures of extracts and essential oils are used for greater control and a standard product. At home, you use the raw ingredients, which should (unless otherwise instructed) be put into a muslin bag and boiled or infused in the vinegar and removed before pickling. Whole spices are also put into the jar, for slow diffusion. Common flavourings are black or white peppercorns, garlic, shallots, onion, whole bruised ginger, tamarind, bay, cloves, cinnamon or cassia sticks, chillies, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, turmeric, white mustard seeds, horseradish, dill, fennel, sage, savory and other items like rue and asafoetida in tiny quantities. Although pickle-spice mixtures can be bought, the more interested cooks (such as the readers of this book) will make their own formulae to suit individual pickles. A standard mixture might be six black peppercorns, two allspice, a large blade of mace, a clove or a chilli, with a pinch of coriander and white mustard seeds, and a few white peppercorns. Too much clove is overwhelming.
Maturation. Pickles and chutneys vary in the time they need to be kept before they can be eaten. Some are designed to be ready very quickly, even the same day, while others need six months. With highly-spiced, thick chutneys, the longer the better, up to a year. A few pickles improve up to 20 years, but most reach a climax and then deteriorate.
Moulds are likely to grow on anything, including the top of pickles, and are not too discouraged by acidity, especially if there is air around. The white scum which forms on vats of fermenting cucumbers and sauerkraut should be skimmed off every ten days. lt is a natural growth and quite harmless, but invites secondary organisms which will turn the pickle musty.
Lemon and lime juice, being very acid
, are preservative and in some cases replace vinegar in pickles. As the citric acid in them is not as good a preservative as acetic acid, it is necessary to follow recipes and not simply to swap lemon juice for vinegar on grounds of health or availability.
Oils are preservative only because they coat the ingredients and tend to exclude air. Mustard oil may also have some special preservative action. There are many oily pickles of Asian inspiration, including pickled fish and pickled chicken and pork. These are all cooked pickles. If I use other oils instead of mustard oil, I always include white mustard seed with it.
Onions. Pickled onions are so popular in Britain that they deserve special mention. Although many are grown locally, they also come into the country from places as far apart as Holland, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Egypt. In the trade, they are classified into three types: the large Ware onions, which are used sliced; the Baby Ware onions which are small specimens of large onions; and the Silver-skins, which come from Holland and are a different type altogether. The smallest are used as cocktail onions.
Commercially, onions are peeled by machine. After the onions have been topped and tailed, either the skin is burned off (the ‘flash’ method), or the onions are put into a machine which slits the outside skin lightly, and blows it off with a high pressure blast of air. For ease of peeling at home, dunk them, a few at a time, into boiling water for 30 seconds (or even up to two minutes) and refresh them in cold water. The skins then come off easily. Onions are always brined for 24 hours before being pickled in vinegar. In some quarters, shallots are thought to make better pickled onions than onions do.
*pH. The degree of acidity needed to make a pickle keep depends on storage temperature, type of pickle and the spices present. A pH below 4 is safe; if a pickle tastes nicely sharp, it is pretty sure to keep.
Piccalilli. A pickle of unknown origin, and a very different commodity in Britain and America. In Britain, it is a mixed pickle in a thick, opaque vinegary sauce full of ground white mustard and turmeric – in the US, it would probably be called mustard pickle. American piccalilli would in Britain be called a sweet mustard pickle.
Salt used for pickling must be pure (not table salt, which is doctored to make it free-running). Special salts are sold for pickling, but any good kitchen salt will serve the purpose.
Scum. See above, moulds.
Sun. Sunlight is antiseptic. It kills micro-organisms, bleaches, and encourages various chemical changes, some of which (see fats and oils) are not beneficial, while others may be. In India, a country with plenty of hot sun and a love of pickles, jars of pickles are very often stood in the sun to mature. The heat speeds the reactions, but the light keeps fermentation in check. Sun is also used to wilt and dry vegetables to reduce their moisture content before pickling. Pickles exposed to sunlight out of doors should be only lightly covered and brought in every night.
Vessels. Since vinegar and salt together are corrosive (the mixture is recommended for cleaning copper), metal vessels should preferably not be used. However, stainless steel is an exception and, at a pinch, aluminium pans can be used just for boiling, but brass or copper preserving pans never. Enamel pans are better, and glass is good. For the jars, glass is usual, but good stoneware is all right. Beware of lead glazed *earthenware jars which could be lethal.
*Vinegar. For good colour, many people use either white wine vinegar or white (uncoloured) malt vinegar. But otherwise, the colour of the vinegar used is immaterial. It is important to use genuine vinegar and not the synthetic stuff that so often spoils commercial pickles. Living in a wine-vinegar country, I often think that English pickles are best made with malt vinegar, but the choice is of little consequence since in nearly every case the vinegar containing the spices and herbs is brought to the boil. The congenerics of a fine vinegar and even the distinction between wine and malt vinegar, therefore tend to be lost; the basic tastes are also overlaid by the spices. Strong spirit vinegar may be necessary for pickling very watery materials, like plums and tomatoes, unless they are slightly dried out before pickling.
*Walnuts. Pickled unripe walnuts are a great British institution (perhaps because walnuts often refuse to ripen in Britain). Most of the walnuts for the pickle industry, though, come in barrels of brine from Italy Sunning is an important part of the pickling process as it helps to blacken the walnuts properly.
*Water. If hard water is used for the brining of vegetables, they are liable to have a bad colour. Indeed Leonard Levinson, in his A Complete Book of Pickles and Relishes (Hawthorn) even gives a pecking order of places in the US, based on the suitability of their water for making good pickles. If there are problems with the water use rain-water or even distilled water.
Indian Onion Pickle
Peel 2.5 kg (5½ lb) of onions and cut them almost through in the form of a cross but without separating the parts. Add 100 g (4 oz) salt, 50 g (2 oz) powdered mustard, ½ teaspoon turmeric, and up to 15 g (½ oz) chilli powder (depending on the strength of the chilli and the toughness of your mouth). Mix all together in a basin with ¼ cup of oil and a little water to moisten the spices and salt and get the onion coated. Then put the whole lot into a jar and just cover them with water. Keep the jar loosely covered in the sun for 4-5 days to ferment. Cool overnight and the pickle is ready to eat.
Indian Mango Pickle
Wash plump but under-ripe mangoes and slice them into brine to prevent discolouration. Mix the mango with salt (four parts by weight of mango to one of salt) and leave in a jar in the sun for five days. Then mix the salted mango with spices. 125 g (4½ oz) fenugreek, 25 g (1 oz) nigella, 25 g (1 oz) turmeric, 25 g (1 oz) black pepper and 25 g (1 oz) anise – all ground – per 1 kg (2 lb) of mango. Add a little rape seed oil to get the mango and spices mixed evenly. Put the mixture into a jar and cover it with more rape seed oil. In 2-3 weeks it is ready to be bottled.
Middle Eastern Pickled Turnip
These pickles are often eaten as part of the meze, with drinks, and can be seen in shops everywhere from Lebanon to Persia. Take turnips the size of tennis balls, wash them and slice off the tops and bottoms. Then cut them into slices some ½ cm (¼ in) or so thick, but the slicing stops short of cutting right through so that the result is like a book held together by 1 cm (½ in) of unsliced turnip at the bottom. These ‘books’ are put to soak for 12 hours in fresh water, after which they are put into glass jars with a slice or two of beetroot to give colour, and several cloves of garlic. The jars are filled with a pickling liquid made of one cup vinegar and two teaspoons salt to two cups water. The pickle is ready to eat in about three days in normal weather.
Quick Pickle
Thinly slice equal quantities of sour apples, cucumbers or celery, and young onions – sufficient to fill a I It (2 pt) jar. Put them into a basin and mix in two teaspoons salt, one teaspoon chilli (or more to taste), and four tablespoons each soy sauce and sherry, pack into the jar and cover with vinegar. This pickle can be used the same day.
[Pickles – French: conserves au vinaigre German: Eingepökelte Italian: sottaceti Spanish: encurtidos]
PIECES. See sugar.
PIG. See pork, ham, bacon.
PIGEON was once a popular food in Europe, and many a house had a dovecote or pigeon loft. Pigeons, with the minimum of care, would range far and wide, gleaning and finding most of their own food. They are supposedly best from mid-summer to Michaelmas (29th September), when many of the birds would be young. The squabs of wild pigeons were also taken from the nest just before they flew; to ensure they remained to become fat, country boys used to climb to Wood pigeons’ nests and tie a string to each young pigeon’s leg. The string was threaded down through the sticks of the nest, and a piece of stick tied close on the other end. Thus, the birds could move but not fly away, and were in due course collected for the table.
Today, pigeons are not favoured in Britain because many people see the scavenging flocks in towns, and suspect that the birds seen in the poulterer’s shop may be these dirty town pigeons or, worse still,
country birds which have been eating seed poisoned with insecticides. However, squabs are commonly on sale in markets in many European towns, and properly fattened little birds of table breeds are available almost everywhere. Squabs should be about four weeks old, and the best have never eaten whole grain; they are a delicacy. Young pigeons are also excellent for any cooking method but older ones are fit only for stewing, game stock or pies.
Pigeons are best starved for 24 hours before being killed (or so the experts say) and, when dead, should be hung up by the legs and bled. lf not, the meat will be dark. They should also be plucked when still warm – never scalded to loosen the feathers – and drawn while fresh. Domestic pigeons are best eaten fresh; the longer they are kept the less flavour they have. Wild pigeons may need hanging for a day or two. The Wood pigeon (Glumba palumbus) and the Rock dove (Glumba Iivia),which is claimed to be the ancestor of the domestic breeds and feral town pigeons, both have their supporters as the best British wild pigeon. Among US species, Mourning doves are eaten in some states, while White-winged doves occur in the south and south-east, and the Western band-tailed pigeon is eaten in the West. Among my old records, there is a wild account of a feast on Passenger pigeons (now extinct) which flocked in incredible numbers to Kentucky.
There are some 475 different species of pigeon and dove in the world, many of which provide very good eating, such as the Australian Wonga-wonga, which has white and delicate flesh. Others have way-out habits, such as the pigeons which feed on nutmegs. All are edible to a greater or lesser degree, but some are best skinned rather than plucked. In China, hardboiled pigeon eggs are a delicacy; if they are taken carefully from the nest, one at a time, the birds will continue to lay.