Sweet and Sour Pickle Prayer
Cooking is perhaps the world’s most uniquely dynamic meditation. And nothing demonstrates this better than pickle making. Ratna Rajaiah looks at the jars, dreaming, that we pass on the recipes and joy passed on to us.
Pickles.
If there was a food version of Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise would have been a plate of curd rice and Renee Zellweger a dollop of avakkai pickle and he would have looked at her and uttered those famous lines:
‘You complete me.’
Pickles.
The saviour of every plate of pallid dal-chawal. That slather on everything from toast to poori. That accompanist without which no concert of an Indian meal is complete.
Pickles.
It worries me.
That if you walk into any grocery shop/supermarket today, there will be at least one prominently visible shelf — if not an entire rack — of packaged pickles. Some appropriate best-seller or two even strategically placed near the cash counter so that, as you pay for your daily bread, you are prodded to crave for a gongura thokku that you never knew till now that you did. (You did not even know what gongura was till now).
And it worries me.
Not because of the usual clichéd argument for homemade versus store bought, though as a mandatory thing, that too.
It is because we may be forgetting something that is as important to know as how to cross the road. Or button your shirt.
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Let me explain.
Pickle making demonstrates part of the reason why cooking besots so many the world over. Because cooking is the only art (alright, Heston Blumenthal-art-science) that demands, insists, in fact puts its foot down for the unconditional, undiluted presence of every part of your being. Your heart, your mind, and your soul. And all your senses. So when you cook, you must see, touch, taste, feel, even hear. Cooking is the being in the here and now. Cooking is perhaps the world’s most uniquely dynamic meditation.
And nothing demonstrates this better than pickle-making. And even though the origin of the word Dutch — ‘pekel’ meaning brine (and the Kannada word ‘uppinakai’ means salted fruit or vegetable), I talk not about the namby-pamby quickies in Western cuisine where a cauliflower is meekly tossed into a weak vinaigrette for a few minutes and it is called a pickle. I talk about those soul-stirring glorious symphonies that take hours, sometimes months to make and that play during every meal time across the length and breadth of this land — the pickles of India — where salt is merely the stage on which the actors perform. And the pickle-maker chooses from a spectacular repertoire of star casts.
As one of the world’s 12 bio-diversity hotspots in the world, India is the centre of origin of what some experts estimate to be 30,000–50,000 of species of cultivated food plants including at least 1000 varieties of mango. It is the birthplace of lemon, turmeric, curry leaf, probably amla, pepper and cardamom. And whatever pickle ingredient did not originate here — tamarind, ginger, jeera and dhania and mustard (to name a miniscule few) — took up residence thousands of years ago.
All such consummate performers, such chameleons that, at the command of a clever cook, they change colour and texture and taste as the role demands. And that is what the pickle-maker learns — to direct this bounty in a multitude of ways — toasting, roasting, frying, squeezing, chopping, grating, grinding, drying, soaking (sometimes for weeks) — and even cooking. And then, finally, carefully, lovingly, judiciously bringing everything together to become that enchantress of the taste bud — a pickle! So you could do worse than be a maker of pickles.
Making pickle also teaches you patience. You have to learn to wait till the cumin slowly roasts just so; till the mango basks and softens in the sun soaking up the brine and till the pickle jars become completely dry. Pickle-making teaches to trust your instincts when they tell you can take a chance and stray a tad more spoons of chilli from the gospel of Mum’s recipe. And to hone your senses till it is they and not the recipe that tell how your pickle is progressing. Most of all, making pickles reconnects you with your roots and celebrates who you are because cooking is a tradition where recipes are handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. And pickle recipes are no different — travelling down generations, branded with the signatures of the great cooks in the family. (Which is why no two gaajar-shalgam pickles can ever be alike just as not two fingerprints can ever be the same.)
In fact, there was a time when part of a cook’s credentials was the row of pickle jars proudly populating the kitchen shelf, much like the medals of a soldier’s chest.
So, it worries me.
That as careers summon, as families shrink and as the pressures of urban living take their toll, it will not be long before in our legacies to our children, many of us may have no favourite family pickle recipe to hand over to them and all they will know is that pickles are things you buy, not make.
In the build up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, when many political parties and the BJP in particular had many aggressively articulate women spokespersons, I became an admirer of the now Minister of State for the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Nirmala Sitharaman. In a background of often strident, sometimes unbearably shrill voices, she stood out as one who made her point very clearly and audibly but with erudition and quiet elegance. Naturally, I Googled her and came across a YouTube video of her making that season’s batch of raw mango pickle supervised by her mother-in-law!
So here is my prayer. May the tribe of Nirmala Sitharamans grow. Women who, no matter how high the perch or power and success they balance upon, will not forget the importance (not to mention the joy) of making pickle.
Ratna Rajaiah is an author and a columnist. She lives and cooks in Mysore.
Featured image: Ratna Rajaiah
