People have been making pickles for more than 2000 years. It is one of the oldest methods of preserving food, although it doesn’t have quite the same antiquity as drying, salting and smoking. The earliest hunter-gatherers knew how to preserve their catch of meat and fish by drying it in the open air, and Neolithic man worked out his own ways of curing long before the idea of pickling was discovered.
The Egyptians probably did some pickling; the Greeks certainly did, but it was the Romans who turned it into a fine art. Columella didn’t mince words when he wrote ‘vinegar and hard brine are essential for making preserves’. Vinegar meant ‘sour wine’, and that’s exactly what it was made from in Roman times. Yeast, dried figs, salt and honey were added to produce something not only vital for pickling, but also used as a drink diluted with water.
The sheer range of Roman pickles was astonishing. Thanks to their vast empire and conquered territories they had access to almost every fruit, vegetable, spice and herb then known and cultivated: from North Africa and the Middle East came plums, lemons, peaches and apricots; from Europe came cured meats and vegetables; their own gardens produced a whole range of herbs, roots and flowers. There were recipes for pickled onions, plums, lettuce leaves, asparagus, fennel and cabbage stalks. Turnips were preserved in a pickle made from honey, myrtle berries and vinegar: the Roman way was to macerate the ingredients in a mixture of oil, brine and vinegar, which was added carefully drop by drop; then the pickles were stored for months in large cylindrical vases.
The Roman Empire didn’t last, and after the fall, the centres of civilised cookery in Europe were the monasteries. The monks knew all about provisions. They made cheese, brewed beer, kept bees and were avid picklers, making extensive use of the produce from their herb and vegetable gardens and orchards. By the eleventh century most of these monastic skills had re-appeared in the kitchens of grand households. Pickling was probably quite limited during this period, because there were few vegetables available—onions, leeks, cabbages and some root crops, but very little else. Not a great prospect for anyone interested in pickling. Some produce was dried, but usually it was a question of eating what was fresh and in season. One of the few early references to a specific pickle is a recipe for ‘pickled greens’ in a household list of 1290. These were probably cabbages and they were most likely pickled in verjuice—the juice extracted from sour crab apples. (The word was used in Roman times to describe a kind of grape juice, but from the Middle Ages until the sixteenth century it was specifically made from crab apples.) It was rather like a very mild, sharp cider, which gives us a clue to the flavour and character of many of those early pickles.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the list of fruits, vegetables and herbs available to cooks increased. And so did the number of pickles. This was pickling’s first Golden Age, and it had its champions— all men: Gervaise Markham, Robert May, John Evelyn, whose Acetaria of 1699 is the great work of its time on herbs and salad vegetables. Here were recipes for pickling broom buds, alexander buds, rock samphire, ash keys, elder shoots, the leaves from young radishes, turnips and lettuce, as well as mushrooms, walnuts and cucumbers.
The Elizabethans loved colour, style and vividness in all things. In their great houses, food was presented with consummate care. Most dazzling of all was the grand salad or salmagundi—an extravagant array of all kinds of herbs, wild plants and vegetables, some raw, others boiled, often with cold meats, cured fish, hard-boiled eggs and a great assortment of pickled things as embellishments. It was also the fashion to decorate these dishes with fresh and pickled flowers to add a special colour and scent. The flamboyance, wit and whimsy of these great presentations matched perfectly the mood of the times.
The second Golden Age of pickling belonged exclusively to the ladies. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the first in a line of classic English recipe books was being published. These books covered every aspect of cooking and domestic skills, which naturally included pickling. Each had a substantial section devoted to the subject, with some marvellous recipes. Hannah Glasse, Eliza Smith, Elizabeth Raffald, Mrs Rundell and many others were the culinary heroines of their age, a century before Mrs Beeton laid her famous tome before the public.
There were echoes of the Elizabethan Age in many of these eighteenthcentury pickles: recipes for radish pods, two ways of pickling artichokes (one using the young leaves, the other making use of the bottoms), barberries and fennel, alongside onions, beetroot and red cabbage. By this time, the range of fruits available to cooks had increased and many of these were pickled too: redcurrants and grapes, melons and peaches, often done in a liquor of wine or wine vinegar.
What really changed the face of pickling was the influence of the East India Company’s trade with the Orient. Travellers brought back all kinds of exotica, from soy sauce to mangoes. This started a vogue for imitations: marrows were pickled to resemble mangoes; cauliflower stalks were turned into mock ginger and pickled elder shoots were thought to resemble bamboo shoots. Piccalilli also appeared around the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first recipes say ‘To pickle lila, an Indian pickle.’ Even then it was a vinegar-based sauce flavoured with garlic, mustard seeds, ginger and turmeric with pieces of cabbage, cauliflower and plums. Not very different to the bright yellow concoction that has become one of today’s best-sellers.
From the east also came chutneys and ketchups. The word chutney is from the Hindustani chatni, meaning a strong sweet relish. Ketchup derived from the Chinese koe-chiap, a pickled fish sauce that was introduced into South-East Asia and India by travellers and Chinese immigrants. So-called ‘store sauces’ became all the rage. There were powerful condiments made from anchovies, wine, horseradish and spices that were intended ‘for the captains of ships’; there was Harvey’s Sauce, Pontac Sauce made from elderberries and, in due course, the most famous of them all, Worcestershire Sauce.What they had in common was pungency and a potent spiciness. The same was true of pickles, which had developed a much stronger flavour than their Elizabethan counterparts.
By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the great pickles had disappeared, banished by lack of interest and changes in fashion. In 1845, when Eliza Acton published Modern Cookery for Private Families, the first commercial pickle factories had begun to appear in London. But Eliza was prepared to speak her mind: she was a champion of good home-cooking and proper pickles. Her book is full of precise, accurate observations and instructions, and she was not afraid to attack bad practice: she took the pickle makers to task for adulterating their vinegar (which was often composed of a dilute solution of sulphuric acid, coloured with burnt sugar) and for deliberately making pickles in copper vessels so that they looked vivid green, but were potentially deadly; and she was prepared to say that most commercial pickles at that time were made from crude, hard, unripe fruit and were basically unwholesome. That was heady stuff for its day. No wonder Eliza Acton is now rated as the forerunner of modern cookery writers.
Subsequently, the food industry began to tighten up its standards, encouraged by laws which resulted from a special government enquiry into food adulteration in 1899. Successive bouts of legislation have attempted to safeguard the consumer, and ‘quality control’ is now the pickle makers’ watchword. But what would Eliza Acton think of the onions from today’s pickle factories, with their spirit vinegar, artificial sweeteners, caramel and colourings? What would be her verdict on some of today’s chutneys, with their sugar beet and swede, their modified starch and gum arabic and their bland, sickly sweet flavour? And what would she make of the fact that many commercial producers still feel impelled to add artificial preservatives to their products, even though they are – by definition – preserved foods? Pickles and chutneys are a multi-million pound business, and our appetite for these curious comestibles shows no sign of waning.
That said, a new spirit and interest in home-pickling is gaining ground. Right across the country there are scores of revivalist cottage industries making pickles on more than a domestic scale, but with real passion and enthusiasm. Their products aren’t intended to replace the big names, but at least we now have some honest and off-the-wall alternatives; old pickles are being re-discovered, new recipes are being invented. And in many enterprising restaurant kitchens, cooks and chefs are putting pickles back where they belong, right at the heart of British cooking.