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RADISH PODS, TO PICKLE (a superior recipe)
Gather the pods when quite young, and lay them in strong brine for twenty-four hours. Drain the brine from them, boil it, pour it upon them boiling hot, and keep the jar well covered, to keep in the steam. When the brine is cold boil it again, and continue this until the pods are green. Drain the pods, put them into glass bottles or unglazed jars, pour over them as much boiling vinegar as will cover them, and when this is cold, boil it a second time, and pour over the pods, which must be well covered with the vinegar. When the pickle is quite cold, tie the jars closely, and store in a cool, dry place. A blade of mace, an ounce of whole ginger, and an ounce of pepper may be boiled with each pint of vinegar.
A Victorian garden pickle that turns bolted radishes into something useful. The whole method hangs on repeated hot brining, and on what you do not do to make the pods green.
- The greeningNineteenth-century cooks often forced pickles green by heating them in a copper or brass pan, which leached verdigris into the vinegar. This recipe says nothing of copper, relying on repeated scalding instead. The pods may only ever turn olive rather than bright green; accept it and do not reach for a copper vessel.
- "Strong brine"Unmeasured in the original. Victorian strong brines were typically in the region of 1 lb salt to 4 pints water, often tested by whether a fresh egg would float. Non-iodised salt is usually recommended, as additives can cloud the liquid.
- Unglazed jarsThe instruction most likely reflects a safety concern rather than an aesthetic one: period glazes were often lead-based and acid drew the lead out. Use modern glass canning jars and plastic-lined lids, since bare metal corrodes in vinegar.
- VinegarUse a vinegar of at least 5 per cent acidity. Boiling drives off some acetic acid, so top the jars up with fresh hot vinegar rather than reboiling the same batch more than the recipe asks.
- The podsPick the seed pods while still crisp and snappable, before any woodiness or visible seed swelling. Once fibrous they stay fibrous through any amount of pickling.
- SpicesA blade of mace is a shard of the lacy husk around nutmeg, not ground mace; an ounce of whole ginger means dried root rather than ground. Bruising it helps it give up flavour, and straining the spices out before bottling keeps the pickle clear.
- StorageThis is an unprocessed pickle with no heat-processed seal. Keep the jars refrigerated and eat within a couple of months rather than treating them as shelf-stable preserves.
- Yield and useUse -- Serve them as you would capers or cornichons, with cold meat, or chopped into a sauce.
Radish seed pods were a standard thrift of the Victorian kitchen garden: once a radish bolts the root is woody and useless, but the pods that follow are crisp and peppery, and cooks pickled them alongside nasturtium buds, samphire and green walnuts as a caper substitute. Some gardeners grew varieties specifically for the pods, the so-called rat-tailed radish, whose pods can reach several inches. The insistence on "unglazed jars" and the pointed absence of a copper pan place this among the later, more cautious pickle recipes; earlier English books cheerfully told cooks to green their pickles in a brass kettle, a practice that food-safety campaigners spent years attacking: Frederick Accum in the 1820s and Arthur Hill Hassall in the 1850s.