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How to Pickle Nasturtium Seeds
As the seeds are gathered wash and dry them: then put them into vinegar to which salt (half a teaspoonful to a pint) has been added. When a sufficient quantity has been collected, scald fresh vinegar, add salt as before, and the seeds from which the first vinegar has been drained. Pour scalding hot into bottles, having the seeds completely covered with vinegar.
A running pickle: you add pods to a jar of vinegar as they ripen over the summer, then repack the lot in fresh hot vinegar at the end. Two things determine whether it works — the stage at which the seeds are picked, and the strength of the vinegar.
- Pick them greenThe seed pods are wanted while still bright green, plump and soft enough to dent with a thumbnail, in the few days after the flower drops. Once they yellow and harden they turn woody and no amount of vinegar will fix it.
- Vinegar strength is the preservativeUse a standard 5% acidity vinegar (cider or white wine both suit the peppery flavour) and do not dilute it. The half teaspoon of salt per pint here is for seasoning, not preservation — modern brined pickles use far more.
- Wash and dry means drySurface water dilutes the vinegar in the jar and encourages surface yeast. Spread the rinsed pods on a towel until no moisture is visible before they go in.
- The first vinegar is sacrificialThe holding vinegar takes up sap from the pods and is likely to end up cloudy and weakened. Draining it and repacking in freshly scalded vinegar, as directed, is presumably why the recipe calls for the second batch.
- Scald, do not boil hardBring the fresh vinegar and salt just to a simmer and pour it over at once. A long rolling boil drives off acetic acid and fills the kitchen with fumes.
- StorageThis is a vinegar pickle poured hot into jars, not a processed canned good. Keep it in the refrigerator, use clean utensils, and check the pods stay fully submerged; anything sitting above the vinegar line will go soft or mould.
- Give it timeThey are edible after a week but sharp and raw-tasting; a month in the jar should round them out, and kept cold they will generally hold their texture for many months.
- Yield and useThe recipe specifies no quantities; you collect what the plants give you. Use the pods as you would capers -- in tartare sauce, with fish, chopped into butter or a potato salad -- a teaspoon or two at a time, since the mustard heat is considerable.
Nasturtium seed pods have been pickled as a substitute for capers for centuries in English and American kitchens, and are still often called poor man's capers. The plant, Tropaeolum majus, came to Europe from South America — generally held to have arrived in the seventeenth century — and was valued as a salad plant long before it became a bedding flower: John Evelyn's Acetaria of 1699 recommends the flowers and buds in a salad, and pickled pods appear in English receipt books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The common name is usually traced to the Latin for nose-twister, a derivation widely repeated though not settled, and taken as a reference to the sharp mustard-oil bite shared by the whole plant — the same family of compounds that makes watercress and horseradish pungent. That a book on salads and chafing-dish suppers includes it says something about the period's kitchen gardens: capers were an imported luxury, while the nasturtium bed by the back door produced pods for free all summer, and a jar of vinegar on the shelf collected them as they came.