The Pickle- Culture In a Bottle?

It was the end of a long international trip and I was waiting to get to my next destination in some desultory German airport. The air of thickened boredom that is usual on such occasions had set in and one was addled into a state of indifference when my senses awoke with a start. I could smell the quite unmistakable smell of Bedekar’s mango pickle. An Indian family had fished out a packet of wafers and was consuming it with the pickle with slow, painstaking and very obvious relish. I watched in burning envy as they demolished the packet, carefully wrapped the pickle bottle in some polythene and returned it to the inner recesses of their improbably shaped bag. I was not alone; all the Indians in the vicinity watched them as intently and with as much naked greed. For those not-so-brief moments we had all been transported back to who we really were thanks to the very distinctive sensory stimulus provided by the pickle.

The pickle exists to transform the dullness of others with its own concentrated brilliance. Unlike its western counterpart, the Indian pickle is stuffed with taste; and delivers more sensory thrills per square inch than almost any other food item. A little bit of it that one delicately bites into with the front of one’s teeth is usually sufficient to make the taste buds squeal with delight. The pickle is the item number in the food platter that heightens the taste notes into a crescendo of pleasure.

To pickle something is to preserve something in its most interesting form. Usually what one pickles is interesting enough to begin with; raw mangoes, green chillies, lime, garlic are all foods that are packed densely with taste. However, this is not a given and one can pickle virtually anything with meat, chicken and radishes being the blander tastes that often get pickled. The end result however, is almost always the same- an intensely interesting taste experience packed in very little quantity. This is a trait shared by its cousins the chutneys, which perform the same role as the pickle, with even greater economy of ingredients.

It is easy to see why the pickle is so central to our diet. It is an inexpensive way to suffuse our food with taste; it allows taste to reside in one small corner of our plates and travel to every morsel that we eat. It isn’t as if our diet is otherwise bland but the pickle ensures that we will never be wanting in that direction. A dry chapati with one vegetable, some raw onion and one spectacular pickle can be quite a gourmet meal! In a larger sense, the pickle points to the democracy that exists with respect to tasty food in our society. Cheap food may compromise on many things but not on taste. Even today, it is difficult to eat bad food on any street in India. In fact, there might even be an inverse relationship between price and taste. It is interesting that in the food hierarchy in India, what becomes inaccessible to the poor are sweets and ‘rich’ food; delicious food is accessible to all.

In many ways, the pickle is the ultimate cultural distillate. Every community and region puts something of itself in the way that it makes its pickle. The pickle transforms something known and generic into the specific and cultural. The pickle carries within it the trace memories of the past and evokes with unerring precision a familiarity with our own cultural selves. We recognise ourselves when we eat a familiar pickle; it binds us tighter to our moorings. It is perhaps true that nothing defines our way of life than our food and as a corollary nothing defines ‘our’ food as sharply as our pickles and chutneys which focus on the particular transformation that ‘our’ mode of cooking brings to the otherwise generic food. The individual is important, how my mother made the mango pickle might differ a little from how my aunt made it, but in both cases what the pickle evokes is something larger and collective.

Which is why the pickle is nothing but culture packed in a bottle. Time, tradition, palate, lineage all get captured in the glass bottles that we carry around and protect so jealously. As with all things, today fewer families make their own pickle; it so much easier to buy them off the shelf. And while these bottles may not carry as much authentic history as those earthen jars where we once stored our pickle, they are good enough to fulfill the essential function that pickle must perform. Take any food and add infuse it with spicy excitement in an unmistakably Indian way. And evoke a sense of familiar belonging that identifies who we are to ourselves. 

(This essay is part of my book Mother Pious lady: Making Sense of Everyday India, Harper collins, 2010)