Home › Pickles and Relishes › Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
length of stem on each. Lay the seeds in cold salted water for two days (two tablespoons salt to one quart water), then place them in cold water for another day. Drain well and place the seeds in a glass jar, cover with vinegar heated to the boilingpoint, and close the jar tightly. In a few days the seeds will be ready to use. They are an excellent substitute for capers.
A straightforward brine-then-vinegar quick pickle, and one of the few recipes in this section that needs no canner and no sugar. The text as printed here begins mid-sentence: the missing opening instructs you to gather the green seed pods just after the flowers drop, with a short length of stem attached.
- Pick them greenUse the plump green seed pods, not the pale yellowing ones that have begun to dry on the vine. Older pods turn woody and pithy and never soften in the brine.
- The salt brineTwo tablespoons of salt to a quart of water is roughly a 3 to 4 percent brine, depending on which salt you use. Use a non-iodized salt — kosher or pickling — as iodine and anti-caking agents can cloud the liquid.
- Why the plain-water dayThe second soak pulls out excess salt so the finished pickle tastes of pepper and vinegar rather than brine. Do not skip it, and change the water once if you can.
- Vinegar strengthUse a vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity — standard white distilled or cider vinegar. Cover the pods completely; anything sitting above the liquid will darken and soften.
- Jar and closure"Close the jar tightly" here means an ordinary sealed jar, not a processed canning seal. Sterilize the jar with boiling water and pour the vinegar in hot, but treat the result as a refrigerator pickle and keep it cold.
- KeepingRefrigerated and kept submerged, the seeds hold for several months and improve for the first few weeks. Discard if the brine turns cloudy, ropy or smells yeasty.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Nasturtiums set seed over a long season, so pick and add in batches, topping up the vinegar as you go.
- Using them as capersThey are hotter and more mustardy than capers — the plant shares the pungent mustard-oil chemistry of watercress and mustard, though it sits in its own family, Tropaeolaceae. Use a slightly lighter hand in sauces, and add them off the heat so the pungency survives.
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) came to Europe from Peru — the smaller Tropaeolum minus reached Spain in the later sixteenth century, while T. majus is generally reckoned to have arrived in the later seventeenth — and was grown as much for the kitchen as for the border; leaves, flowers and pods were all eaten, and the pickled seeds appear in English household books from the eighteenth century onward as a homegrown stand-in for imported capers, which had to travel from the Mediterranean and cost accordingly. The substitution is a matter of pungency rather than botany — true capers are the flower buds of Capparis spinosa — but both bring sharp punctuation to a sauce. The recipe's presence in a Butterick volume is telling: this was a pattern company's household compendium aimed at women running a house on a budget, and a pickle made from a plant already growing by the porch, requiring nothing but salt and vinegar, was exactly the sort of small economy such books were built to collect.