Home › Vegetables › Martynias
Martynias
Pick two quarts of martynias. Wipe carefully with a soft cloth, take sufficient cider vinegar to cover, put in a porcelain kettle, add a sliced onion, a dozen whole cloves, two blades of mace, two bay leaves. Put the martynias in a stone jar, pour the vinegar over while hot, add two tablespoonfuls of chopped horse-radish, fasten, and in three or four days they will be ready for use.
A quick vinegar pickle of young martynia pods, a plant most cooks no longer grow and no supermarket carries. Everything hinges on the age of the pods.
- What a martynia isThe immature seed pod of Proboscidea louisianica, also called devil's claw or unicorn plant. Only very young pods work — roughly two to three inches long, still soft and downy, snapping cleanly like a green bean. Once the interior woodens and the beak begins to harden, no amount of vinegar will make them edible.
- SourcingYou will almost certainly have to grow them; seed is sold by heirloom suppliers and the plant behaves like a sprawling annual in warm ground. They are rarely offered for sale, though they may occasionally turn up at Southwestern markets.
- Porcelain kettleAn enamel-lined or stainless pan. The point is a non-reactive surface — hot vinegar pulls metallic flavours and colour out of bare cast iron, copper and aluminium.
- Blades of maceWhole strips of the lacy aril from around the nutmeg. Conversions vary widely; two blades is somewhere between a quarter and a full teaspoon of ground mace. Ground mace clouds the brine, so buy whole blades if you can.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar sold today is usually about 5 per cent acidity (4 per cent is the labelling minimum), and that acidity is what makes this pickle keep. Do not dilute it, and do not substitute a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- Heating the brineThe instruction is compressed: heat the vinegar with the onion, cloves, mace and bay in the pan, then pour it over the pods packed in the jar. The recipe says only 'while hot'. The pods themselves are never cooked, which is what keeps them crisp.
- Stone jar and storageUse a glass jar with a non-corroding lid. This is a fresh-pack refrigerator pickle, not a canned one — nothing has been processed for shelf storage. Cool it, refrigerate it, and use within a couple of months.
- Yield and timingTwo quarts of pods fills roughly two quart jars. Three or four days is the minimum for the spice and horseradish to penetrate; a week is better.
Martynia, or the unicorn plant, is native to the southern United States and northern Mexico. The ripe pod dries and splits into two long curved claws that hook onto the legs of passing animals and so scatter the seed, giving the plant its other common name of devil's claw; the name unicorn plant refers instead to the single horn-like beak of the green pod. Nineteenth-century American gardeners grew it deliberately as a pickling crop, in the same spirit as nasturtium buds and green walnuts — anything that could be caught young and dropped into spiced vinegar became a relish for the winter table. Seed catalogues of the period listed it among the kitchen-garden novelties, and it appears in general cookery books of the 1890s and 1900s as a matter of course, which tells you how much more of the garden reached the table then than now. It has largely dropped out of cultivation as a vegetable, though the pods remain important in some Southwestern Native American basketry and foodways, where the long black claws of the mature fruit are split for weaving.