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Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
1 cup vinegar 3 peppercorns 1 tablespoon salt Nasturtium seeds Pour the vinegar into a large mouth pint bottle. Add the salt and peppercorns. Gather the nasturtium seeds on a dry day, and wipe them clean with a damp cloth. Add them to the vinegar. If there are not enough to fill the bottle, it will do no harm to add to them from day to day. When full, seal the tops by dipping them into melted sealing wax or paraffin. They will be ready for use in a few months. Serve in sauce with lamb or mutton. • •
A cold vinegar pickle of green nasturtium pods, gathered a handful at a time as the plants set seed. Nothing is cooked, so the acidity of the vinegar is doing all the work.
- Pick the pods greenTake the seeds while they are still plump, bright green and soft enough to dent with a fingernail, a few days after the flower drops. Once they yellow and harden they turn woody and no amount of vinegar will soften them.
- Use full-strength vinegarStandard bottled cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent acidity, undiluted, is what makes this keep. Do not cut it with water, and do not substitute a low-acid "drinking" or homemade vinegar of unknown strength.
- Keep them submergedThe instruction to add seeds from day to day works, but each addition raises the level; top up with more vinegar so every pod stays covered. Anything sitting proud of the liquid will spoil and taint the jar.
- Skip the sealing waxWax or paraffin over the stopper was mainly a closure against evaporation and insects rather than a preserving step in itself. A modern jar with a plastic-lined or all-glass lid does the same job; avoid bare metal, which vinegar corrodes.
- Store coldThis is a fresh-pack pickle with no heat process. Keep the jar in the refrigerator, where it will hold for many months, rather than in a warm cupboard.
- "Ready in a few months"Three to six weeks is usually enough for the pods to lose their raw mustard heat and firm up; longer only improves them. They are at their best after a season.
- Yield and useA pint bottle holding a cup of vinegar leaves room for roughly a cup of packed pods. Use them anywhere capers go: chopped into a caper sauce for boiled mutton, into brown butter for fish, or whole in a potato salad.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt to a cup of vinegar is a firm seasoning, not a cure. Fine table salt with anti-caking agents will cloud the jar; use kosher or pickling salt.
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) is generally said to have reached Europe from South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was quickly absorbed into the English kitchen garden, where the green seed pods became a standing substitute for imported capers — "poor man's capers" is the traditional name, and John Evelyn recommended nasturtium in salads in Acetaria (1699). The pods share a sharp mustard-oil bite with true capers, which is why the substitution held so long. Its appearance in an American cookbook of the early twentieth century reflects a household economy in which a flower bed was also a larder: capers had to be bought from a grocer at a price, while the nasturtiums by the back fence set seed all summer and cost a cup of vinegar. The pairing with lamb or mutton is the giveaway — caper sauce over boiled mutton was one of the fixed points of the nineteenth-century English table, and this is how you made it without capers.