Super-charged pickles that add zip and zing to the dinner table

Creates his own pickles with flavours that dance on the tongue

As we draw towards the end of the strangest year any of us can remember, here’s what I’ve found myself thinking as I’ve gone about my daily chores in the kitchen… I wish - I really really wish - that lots of the stuff I know now had been part of my culinary armoury many years ago.

Which is, of course, an obvious thing for anyone in their 60s to think. But I’ve two reasons for declaring it at the top of a food article…

One is that this is the year we’ve all been doing a great many chores in our kitchens. The pandemic has meant I’ve been doing none of my normal travelling and hardly any eating out – which has meant I have prepared just about every meal in our household since March. So thank goodness for all those helpful gadgets, appliances and recipe books – and for all the hard-won skills gleaned from five decades of cooking.

Which brings me to the second reason for saying I wish I’d always known what I know now. Let us take just one culinary term as an example: Pickle.

Like most people I used to be in a right old pickle when it came to pickles. By which I mean: I had no real idea what the term meant or what it was all about – save for the fact that pickling referred to a very sharp, vinegary way of preserving certain vegetables.

Namely, small onions. I can still feel the searing tears that would scorch the eyes of everyone in our little council house after my gardening grandfather had harvested great bags of ping-pong ball sized onions for my granny and mum to pickle.

Then there’d be another day when mum filled the house with vinegar smells in her annual bid to create shelves of jarred chutneys. These fragrant eye-watering Sarson’s moments would be joined by pickled red cabbage days, alongside occasional optimistic forays into the art of piccalilli perfection. And that was it. Pickles were sharp and acidic and something that seemed to be particularly loved by old men. They were okay – good at cutting through the fatty saltiness of indifferent cheese – but they weren’t a high point of culinary delight.

Now they are. In my kitchen at least. And in a good many other households too if my food blog and recipe reading is to be believed.

One man who’d definitely agree is Devon food writer Mark Diacono who penned a book called Sour (published by Quadrille £25) a couple of years ago. “Our appreciation of the sour is returning,” he writes. “Almost everything you eat can – and should – be acidified in some way. What are brown sauce, ketchup, piccalilli, or vinegar, if not happy-making ways of souring a chip?

“That slice of lemon in a gin and tonic, a slack spoonful of yoghurt or crème fraîche with the chilli, a gloss of dressing on salad leaves: sourness is there, every day. The increasingly available range of naturally sour citrus, rhubarb, cherries, tamarind and sour spices are reaching a more inquisitive audience, while more of us are embracing sour fermented foods such as sourdough, kefir and kombucha, which we owe to the resurgent skills of artisan bakers, cheesemakers and fermentistas.”

Sour is a wonderful book that I’d recommend as a present for anyone who wants to add zing to their meals. I have made a good many recipes from its pages, but I also have developed my own daily system which sees fresh pickles being brought out of the fridge just about every meal time.

By making a very simple pickling liquor from wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of sea-salt and one of sugar, plus a splash of cold water, I have kept a jar of crunchy refreshing pickled vegetables on the go ever since the wretched pandemic began. I thinly slice onions (any onion: red, white whatever), dice carrots, chop cucumber and chuck it is the mix. Sometimes there’ll be a bit of fresh white cauliflower or the inner soft stems of celery. On other days there’s be a fiery red chilli or a grating or two of fresh ginger.

It’s a top-up regime which I add to either every day or so, and is the work of just two or three minutes. And it is hugely rewarding, because a spoonful or two this pickle mix is capable of enlivening just about every meal we have. A layer of the crisp crunchy fast pickled veg will totally transform a plain barbecued burger in a bun, for example, or take cheese on toast to a totally different level. Suddenly, pickling doesn’t have to mean the annual tear-wrenching morning of death by oniony vinegar or the fume-filled bubbling of the autumnal manufacture chutney. It’s quick and delicious. I wish I’d known about fresh pickles 40 years ago.