Pickle & Preserve

One of the great pleasures of salting lies in not salting. Salt cure your lemons beforehand, cook and assemble your ingredients, serve, and let the lemon’s super-salted flavors hop around the plate like Taskiouine dancers. The citrus and salt goad each other on in a warrior’s dance, all white tunics and turbans and powder horns, and in your mind ring the bells of camels and the beat of rawhide tambourines. Simmer chicken in diced preserved lemon, olives, and fresh coriander for a superb tagine. Make a compound butter of minced preserved lemon, ancho or espanola peppers, and cilantro to serve over pan-fried fish. Chop preserved lemon with parsley, dill, shallots, and olive oil for a relish to top anything from rack of lamb to a goat cheese tart. And cut a strip of rind to garnish a negroni cocktail.

The Hindus paint a red dot, or bindi, on their foreheads as an ancient form of ornamentation that also indicates a focal point of meditation: the third eye, the site of the bright inner flame that burns in our mind’s eye. People living in the warmer climates of Latin America wear a bindi of another sort, a cucumber slice stuck to their forehead to keep cool on a hot day. This practice has always fascinated me. The sure knowledge that as the afternoon wore on the wearer’s sweat would salt that cucumber also made me hungry. The crisp, acidic rush of tsukemono, or Japanese pickles, brings focus and refreshment as an accompaniment to grilled fish, rice dishes, and sashimi. It can also be eaten on its own in a meditative moment.

If there is any dish that could be served with every meal, every day, morning, noon, and night, it’s butter leaf lettuce salad. Eggs Benedict with butter leaf lettuce salad; cheeseburgers with butter leaf lettuce salad; pasta alla carbonara with butter leaf lettuce salad. Or, for a snack, just butter leaf lettuce salad. Its acidic elegance balances out the heartiness of any meal. The trick is the dressing. Making your own vinaigrette is among the biggest single improvements you can do in the kitchen—it becomes a distillation of your aesthetic defined by acid, oil, sweetness, and salt. Jennifer’s mastery of the vinaigrette has done more to promote the advancement of cuisine in our house than anything else: the shallots discover a plump, inner sweetness in the vinegar; the olive oil expresses its spicy-green spirit in response to the pepper; and the mustard emulsifies so that the dressing coats the lettuce in silkiness. Then the Maldon, strewn across the surface of the dressed salad—a glittering fencework of flakes perched along the crests and vales of lettuce—snaps like static electricity to stimulate the palate—a flash of pungency that illuminates everything so quickly and clearly that it is gone before you have time to fully comprehend what happened. This is Maldon’s raison d’etre: to reveal and amplify, then vanish, leaving you with only the desire for another bite.

Whether in food or in adventure, our great life-affirming moments often come when nature and sentience find themselves suddenly on intimate terms. Gulping a fresh oyster from the half-shell can be as exhilarating as sailing headlong into white-capped seas with only the song of steel-cold air in the rigging to keep you company. This is why I never tire of the fall season’s promise for new discoveries in oysters. I recently discovered the Totten Inlet Virginicas from the southern Puget Sound: minerally, fresh, and clean with a consistently firm meaty texture. Introducing Shinkai deep sea salt to the Totten was an opportunity for a culinary adventure I could not pass up. The mineral flavors of the oysters amplify the abundant steely flavors already apparent in the salt, and bring to light glints of sweetness and kelp that you might never find on your own. A drop of mignonette and a pinch of Shinkai deep sea salt; the sea god Neptune never had better.

Lovage looks like a young celery branch with leaves, and in fact tastes like a slightly spicy celery. Most farmers’ markets have it in the spring and summer. Substitute a celery branch for the lovage stem in a pinch.

Make this in late June or early July when strawberries are abundant at your local farmers’ market, and you’ll enjoy it for months to come. Pectin, a water-soluble substance used as a thickener in jams and jellies, is available in many supermarkets. Serve this jam with any of Bubby’s fruit breads or muffins. You can also substitute blackberries, raspberries, or blueberries for the strawberries. You can mix the berries, too. Though you don’t need to sterilize the three 1-quart storage jars, you should wash the berries well. We are not canning here, or sealing, so it’s not the same process. This jam will keep for three to four weeks in the refrigerator.

A beautiful pink, intensely flavored butter, this can be made with either fresh or frozen, thawed berries. The butter should be a little cooler than room temperature when you whip it. Take the butter out of the refrigerator a half hour to an hour before you plan to use it, so it can soften.

The sour crispness of red cabbage makes it a good ingredient for a relish. Something stirring—hot, sharp, sour, bright—to introduce to a gamey pâté or a wedge of pork pie with softly collapsing pastry. Not normally given to making pickles and chutneys, I find this startling relish manageable without feeling I am going too far down the preserving route.

A pickle can be a symphony of flavors. Be creative with pickling spices—try throwing in the whole kitchen sink if you like. Experiment with different accents: cumin seeds and coriander for an Indian pickle; caraway, celery, and mustard seeds to evoke Eastern European flavors; ginger, garlic, bruised lemongrass, and a shot of soy for a taste of Southeast Asia. For a crisp pickle start with crisp fruits and vegetables; those that are just shy of ripe work well.

This is a simple pickle with bold flavors. For a variation, try adding fresh herbs, a dash of red pepper flakes, or a wedge of orange.

Tamarind provides acidity with a delicious fruity tartness. It is mainly used in Indian, Thai, and Mexican cooking, although it grows in many tropical climates, including Florida. Look for the caramel-colored tamarind concentrate or paste in markets, as extracting the fruit from the pods is labor-intensive. Use the ketchup on the Indonesian Corn Fritters (page 155), Indian Spiced Scrambled Eggs (page 75), and burgers or grilled shrimp. For all of the preserving recipes, including this one, use kosher salt; unlike table salt, it is free of additives that can discolor ingredients.

This lightly pickled mackerel is “cooked” through by the acid in the vinegar. Use high-quality fish, and keep it refrigerated until you marinate it. Use a glass or ceramic baking dish as metal can interfere with the pickling process. Both Spanish and king mackerel are fished using low-impact methods, and populations in the Atlantic and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico are thriving. They reproduce in high numbers and mature quickly, so mackerel are considered safe from overfishing. Start this recipe the night before serving so the fish has time to marinate.

A Southern tradition, chow-chow is a spicy, pickled fruit-and-vegetable relish that utilizes the produce at the end of the harvest. The fruit and vegetables can vary from recipe to recipe, and can include green tomatoes, sweet peppers, onions, cabbage, carrots, and cucumber. Since Meme and Dede had a pear tree in their yard, they made chow-chow with pears. When I called Aunt Louise to ask for this recipe, she started reciting, “A peck of pears, peeled, cored, and sliced.” I laughed. Members of my family teasingly offer loving sentiments accompanied by the phrase, “A bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.” But that is pretty much the extent of my definitive knowledge about a peck. However, a peck is an actual measurement: one-fourth of a bushel, which is about fifty pounds, depending on what is being measured. Bushel and peck baskets made of curved wooden slats with thin wire handles are still seen at farmer’s markets and farm stands all across the South.

There’s an ancient pear tree at the edge of Mama’s driveway. The pears have thick green skin, are very aromatic, and have an intense pear flavor. Most certainly a now-nameless heirloom variety, they appear to be similar to an Anjou or a Bartlett. Remember the canned pears often served with cottage cheese in the school cafeteria? Those are Bartlett pears. Anjou pears are distinctive in that they remain green even when fully ripe. Meme and Dede preserved the pears from the yard in quart containers packed in heavy syrup. Meme served them chilled for dessert and topped with grated Cheddar cheese for “salad.” One of our favorite treats was the deep-fried, half-moon-shaped pies she made with pureed pears and biscuit dough.

Southerners are almost as fond of pickling as we are of frying. Submerging fresh produce in vinegar or a combination of sugar and vinegar meant there would be vegetables to eat in the winter months. Pickling recipes encompass not just simple cucumbers, but also more unusual ingredients, such as watermelon rind, green tomatoes, and okra. Okra responds very well to pickling; the vinegar virtually eliminates the slime factor, the main reason people don’t eat okra. I like to use one of these crisp, spicy pods instead of an olive for a Southern-style martini.

When I see Jonagold apples at the market, I buy them, always thinking of my sister, Jona. My parents got a little creative with her name. It’s feminine for John, my father’s name. A blend between Jonathan and Golden Delicious, Jonagold apples are great for apple butter and applesauce. They have a tendency to soften in the refrigerator, so they are best used shortly after harvest.

Dede loved pickled peaches and all manner of preserves. Every year, there was a garden of fruits and vegetables. In the summer, my family would put up quart upon quart of green beans, peaches, and canned tomatoes, and in the fall, golden pears in syrup and muscadine preserves. He’d seal the lids tightly with his strong hands and place them in rows on shelves in the basement. The name of this recipe reminds me of the tongue twister, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Dede would often recite similar silly phrases, play word games, and come up with whimsical names for foods: “cat head” was a large biscuit. “Wasp’s nest” was loaf bread. “Floppy motus” was gravy. And Jell-O was appropriately called “nervous pudding.”

Muscadines are wild American grapes native to the Southeast. Scuppernongs are a variety of muscadines. Both grapes have a tough, thick skin that ranges in color from deep purple to greenish bronze. There are scuppernong and Muscadine arbors more than fifty years old at my family’s home. The thick branches are gnarled and twisted, forming a large canopy instead of growing in a row like traditional grapes. Dede made muscadine wine and stored it in the basement. It was unfiltered and quite sweet. We recently found a bottle, at least twelve years old, that had aged and mellowed to a honey liqueur. The wine-making ended when Dede passed away, but Meme and Mama have always made jelly from the copious amounts of fruit. I think I was in first grade when I had my first taste of store-bought jelly. It was the ubiquitous Concord grape jelly of childhood, and I remember not liking it. I had never had jelly before that wasn’t homemade. My friend’s mother very likely thought I was either a complete brat or a complete hick. As children, my sister and I would stand for hours at the arbor, using both hands and mechanically eating the fruit like locusts. We’d squeeze the fruit into our mouths and spit out the seeds and bitter skins. Once, I reached into the arbor to pick a greenish globe and just as my fingers started to close on the fruit, it moved. My scuppernong was the head of a green snake. Scared out of my wits, I ran screaming into the house. Meme’s constant reminder about staying out of the bushes because of snakes had finally come true.