The untold story of mango pickle
As per a popular dictionary pickle is a relish consisting of vegetables or fruit preserved in vinegar or brine
The term pickle is derived from the Dutch word pekel, meaning brine In the United States and Canada, the word pickle alone almost always refers to a pickled cucumber (other types of pickles will be described as “pickled onion”, “pickled beets”, etc.). In the UK pickle generally refers to ploughman’s pickle, such as Branston pickle, traditionally served with a ploughman’s lunch.
Let’s talk about the mainstream pickle, A pickled cucumber (commonly known as a pickle in the United States and Canada or generically as gherkins in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia) is a cucumber that has been pickled in a brine, vinegar, or other solution and left to ferment for a period of time, by either immersing the cucumbers in an acidic solution or through souring by lacto-fermentation.
Now let’s come to India. Like language, colors, race etc., India has vast variety of pickles and majority of them are spicy. Of course it has to be!
The one illustrated here is called tender mango pickle. In Kannada (A South Indian language) it is called ‘Midi uppinakayi/ ಮಿಡಿ ಉಪ್ಪಿನಕಾಯಿ. This is somewhat different from other pickles in India.
Its starts with plucking the raw tender mangoes from the tree. Usually these mango trees are not so common as they aren’t sweet when they ripe. They are very sour! And to become best pickle it has to be sour. It is often observed that there exists one such tree for 2-3 villages of which these trees don’t yield every year, sometime once in 3-5 years. So there is a huge demand for them. Usually people pre-book certain number of mangoes (usually in thousands) with the property owner where that tree lies. However these days due to commercialisation, people are using all sorts of mangoes to make the pickle. Luckily there are few families who still adhere to the traditional recipe.
Pickle mango trees are almost non-existent from the memory of the current generation. That’s about the tree!
Once plucked, these mangoes are washed cleaned and dried with cotton cloth so that there is no trace of moisture left on them otherwise they will get spoiled over the time. Also it is made sure that all the injured/bad mangoes are filtered out.
Rest is almost same as the other pickle recipe followed in many parts of the world. These mangoes are then transferred into a large airtight container mixed with equal amount of rock salt and tightly sealed. In few weeks the mangoes would shrunk to almost 1/5th of their original size or may be more. By the way these big containers are often stored in the attic.
As per the requirement, the mother would take out the salted and shrunk mangoes from the jar and puts the special pickle masala to it. Again the recipe of this masala is a family secret. It gets passed on over the generation. In the future chronicles, let’s talk about these masala recipes! Another interesting thing is these salted mangoes are usually kept for 3-5 years as the availability of good mango is rare.
In south interior part of Karnataka (a south Indian state), in malnad region, whenever someone visits the home, the lady of the house will serve drinking water along with 2-3 pieces of pickle or jaggery. Just take a bite from the pickle and drink the water. Legend says one tastes heaven in that moment.
When you are feeling too much lazy to cook, most south Indians just make rice hand have it with curd and pickle
Do you know in which finger, Indians taste pickle? Now that’s some food for your thought!
Write your comments below, will meet over the next chronicle.