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Nasturtium Seed Pickle
Put half a cup of vinegar, in which a tablespoonful of salt has been dissolved, in a pint glass preserving jar that has a cover. As you gather the green nasturtium seeds, put them into the vinegar until the jar is almost full. If there is not enough vinegar in the jar to cover the seeds, add enough more to do so. Ready for use when the seeds are soft and brown. Delicious with cold meat, used instead of capers in cream sauce, and chopped in mayonnaise.
A jar you build over weeks rather than an afternoon's work. Two things decide whether it succeeds: the stage at which the pods are picked, and keeping them under the vinegar the whole time.
- Pick the pods greenTake the seed pods while they are still bright green, plump and soft enough to dent with a fingernail — usually a few days after the flower drops. Once they turn straw-coloured and hard they stay hard, and no amount of vinegar will fix them.
- Keep them submergedThe half cup of vinegar is only a starter for an empty jar. Every time you add a handful of pods, check the level and top up so nothing sits above the liquid; exposed pods will mould and spoil the jar.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5-percent acidity cider or white wine vinegar. Some artisan and homemade vinegars are weaker and are not reliable for a preserve held this long.
- The saltA tablespoon per half cup is a strong brine by design. Plain pickling or kosher salt is best; iodised table salt can darken the brine and iodine-free coarse salt dissolves cleanly in cold vinegar if you shake it.
- Jar and coverA pint preserving jar is about 2 cups, so expect roughly a cup and a half of pods. Use a plastic or lined lid — vinegar corrodes bare metal and will put a metallic edge on the pickle.
- "Soft and brown"This is the only doneness cue given, and it takes time: expect several weeks after the last pods go in, and often two months or more. Keep the jar cool and dark, or in the refrigerator, and taste one before you commit them to a sauce.
- Using themThey are hotter and more mustardy than true capers, so start with rather less than a caper recipe calls for and adjust to taste. Add them to cream sauce off the heat; prolonged simmering drives off the pungency that makes them worth having.
- YieldOne pint jar, which is a season's picking from a few plants and enough to season sauces and mayonnaise for months.
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) came to Europe from South America in the seventeenth century and was grown as much for the kitchen as the border — leaves and flowers in salads, pods in the pickle jar. The pickle exists because capers, the flower buds of a Mediterranean shrub, had to be imported and cost accordingly, while nasturtiums sprawl cheerfully in poor soil and produce pods all summer; the substitution is old enough that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery books already treat it as standard rather than novel. Both plants carry sharp mustard-family-style compounds, which is why the swap works on the palate and not merely in the purse. Its appearance in a book of this kind, alongside a menu that uses the flowers as garnish, is characteristic of household cookery that expected a garden out the back door and disliked waste — the pickle asks for nothing but a jar left on the shelf and a handful of pods whenever you pass the plants.