Pickles, Chutneys and Ketchups

According to Henry Sarson, whose book Home Pickling is one of my favourites, ‘only a pickled peach can beat a good pickled walnut, and not always then’. The book was written in 1940 for all those who had forgotten or ‘never knew how to make pickles like mother used to make’, for the enthusiastic allotment diggers whose surpluses rotted in the tool shed, and for greenhouse owners whose last tomatoes failed to ripen in ‘the fickle English sun'. Lord Woolton, then Minister of Food, welcomed the book, seeing it as an encouragement to the population to improve the restricted war-time diet by eating vegetables, to avoid waste and to reduce reliance on food imports. None of these reasons pertains to pickling now, but it is still worth doing to add different flavours and textures to our food.