#7: Jars of pickle & whisperings of generations
An ode to a condiment of heritage that home is incomplete without
I was going to write about hope or self-care or standing by what’s right this week. Instead, I decided to give you a light, nostalgic piece that’ll give you a few minutes to read something entirely different and hopefully take your mind off goings-on. I hope you’re all hanging in there.
In my Mangalore-meets-Madikeri home in the ever-unifying Bangalore, few things come more heavily laden with nostalgic baggage than the beloved pickle jar — the uppinakai barani, as we call it.
In most homes, tantalisingly marinated citrus, fruits, even seafood, are filled into earthenware pots. But my home is more familiar with an assortment of glass jars saved from a tragic end in the recycling bin by my "all things have multiple lives" mother. This legacy stems from her years in the kitchen of our Nigeria home, bottling preserves in haphazard jars salvaged from a post-olive, post-honey, or post-jam fridge cleanse. We've since moved back, and now have access to the quintessential pickle barani, yet the makeshift make-do became a tradition.
It's pretty well-known that Indians top many dishes with a spoonful of pickle to seal the deal. But what the poor replicas of Indian food overseas fail to get right is that our pickles aren't like hot jalapeños and cucumbers enveloped in brine. No, our pickles are a hot mess of fiery spice, citrus tang and surprising pops of sweet and sour. It makes both your eyes and mouth water, albeit for opposing reasons.
There's a pickle for everyone under the sun. The ones on the straight path choose the quintessential mixed pickle. Those who want a party on their tongue reach for lemon or wild mango. The hedonistic take to the crunchy bamboo shoots version. Those YOLO folks with not a care for their life or the wellbeing of their intestines try Bhoot Jolokia — which, incidentally, is 400 times hotter than your garden-variety Tabasco sauce.
The draw of pickle for me isn't necessarily the pickle itself, surprisingly — it's the nostalgia-laden process.
On a pickling day (there isn't a fixed one because my mother is a puppet of her whims and fancies), the entire kitchen is cleared of humans and dogs in quite the same way as the pots and the pans being pushed away. The already gleaming black granite counter is wiped down twice over to get rid of any droplets of water (which, I'll have you know, is your worst enemy while pickling). A mask is brought out and donned so no bacteria interfere with the process; spoons and necessary bowls are also rubbed down and dried.
Then the star of the show is brought out. One one day, it's a collection of quartered and refrigerated lemons that I contributed to, one at a time, after making my morning hot lemon water. One another day, it's a handful of smooth and impossibly round nellikai (amla, or Indian gooseberry) to be tossed whole into the spice mix. Somedays there's a wildcard entry — Mangalore cucumber, perhaps, or the looks-like-ginger-but-smells-like-mango nela maavu (also called kukku shunti, depending on who you ask). The star ingredient defines the outcome; lemon and wild mango equate my grandmother's pickle as strange additions indicate an experimental recipe.
While the main ingredient is prepped, the spices are loaded onto a pan for frying. A quick glance will show you red chilli, mustard, salt, cumin seeds, coriander seeds. The rest is lost behind the tears in your smarting eyes. First, the aroma fills the air, then the spice — and a series of coughs and sneezing emerge from different currently occupied parts of the house. Once reactions subside (supported a great deal by the aforementioned mask), the fried mixture is ground into a smooth powder; adding oil creates the paste that is then smeared over the star ingredient and transferred into the barani.
At least, that's the process my mother tells me today. Tomorrow, who knows? You'd think that such an intense, culturally significant facet of our South Indian culture would have a blow-by-blow recipe to follow, perhaps written on ageing scrolls and passed on through generations. Passed on it is, but just the premise — the rest of it is just, as I've heard so many times, "a little of this, a little of that and your tastebuds will show you the way". To be fair, that's quite how I'd like to go about life, too.
As I write this, I can see from the corner of my eye an array of jars big and small, each with the lids tightly screwed on over a sheet of thick plastic, so air doesn't get in. Inside the jars, it's a whole world — of fermentation, marination, a delicate dance of flavours. Of spices and acids and fibres doing what nature intended them to do while we sit watching, fascinated.
And to ward off the temptation of cracking open a jar, for one glorious spice-and-sour spoonful tempered by the scoldings of my mother, there's a smaller bowl of salted wild mangoes laid out. Like a teaser before the curtain rises.
Illustration and photograph by yours truly
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