India's 'Pickle Queen' Preserves Everything, Including the Past.
'Usha Prabakaran’s 20-year-old cookbook, crammed with recipes from home cooks, is simple and self-published. But it has become a cult classic in India.
CHENNAI, India — Usha Prabakaran was at home, talking on the phone with a college friend, when she stopped making sense. Her speech scrambled. Her vision blurred. She dropped the receiver and fell to the floor.
It was 1998 and Ms. Prabakaran, a former lawyer living in Chennai, a major city on India’s southeastern coast, had just slogged through a decade of research and recipe testing for her comprehensive, single-subject cookbook, “Usha’s Pickle Digest.” A party was scheduled for the following week.
At the hospital, Ms. Prabarakan learned that a rare fungus had lodged itself in the front of her brain. She needed surgery to remove the tumor, and long periods of rest to recover. The book, and the party, were quickly forgotten.
But over the next two decades, “Usha’s Pickle Digest,” self-published by an unknown author, with a first print run of just 1,000, became a cult classic in India and its diaspora — praised for its precision and scope, celebrated on blogs and podcasts and hunted down in shops, where it sold out.
Hard copies were scarce. For years, the only way to get one was to email Ms. Prabakaran herself, who might promise to print another run soon, when she was feeling better. . .
Chitra Agrawal, a New York cookbook author and founder of the pickle company Brooklyn Delhi, remembers the ceramic jugs at her grandmother’s home in Bengaluru in southern India, which held lemons in a slushy saltwater brine. This Karnataka-style pickle was seasoned with fresh green chiles and mango ginger, a fruity-tasting rhizome related to turmeric.
But the pickles Ms. Agrawal enjoyed with her family up north were completely different. For Punjabi-style burvan lal mirch, long red chiles were individually stuffed with fennel seeds, onion seeds and fenugreek seeds, then stored in oil, not brine. . .
Mango and lime pickles are commonly sold in the United States, but nothing escapes pickling in India: plums and hog plums, cherries and chokecherries, sprouted fenugreek seeds, bamboo shoots, fat gooseberries, hibiscus flowers and green walnuts. Cooks work with all kinds of fruits, vegetables, flowers, roots and seeds, using every edible part of every possible food.
These pickles trot out at breakfast, lunch and dinner, expanding the pleasures of every meal, from a plain bowl of rice and yogurt to a grilled cheese sandwich.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/dining/indian-pickle-queen-usha-prabakaran.html?
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