(From the recipe collection in Haroun and the Study of Mischief. But also I thought it was hilarious to post the spicy and sour pickle recipe the week after the pink-and-roses recipe and the day after Valentine’s Day, which I also call Discount Chocolate Day.)
In bookish news, Chai and Charmcraft is now available both for preorder and in ARC copies — here’s the ARC application form, if you’re the kind of person who likes reading and reviewing cozy fantasy with a low-spice MM relationship! And I’ve started a scribbly proto-book page for Katayef and Kittens; everything there is extremely tentative, especially the cover, because I won’t get a chance to work on a final design with Augusta until April. But I need the page link sooner than that for back-of-book blurbs, so here’s a start.
In the meantime, here are your sour mango pickles for anyone feeling particularly tart about Valentine’s Day!
Aam ka achaar
At the present time, the word achaar is used commonly in South Asia for often oil-preserved pickles that are usually fruits and vegetables, though it’s linguistically connected to the Persian word for powdered, vinegared, or brined pickles that could be meat or fish as well as fruits and vegetables.
Green mangoes have been popular in achaar for over a thousand years now; lotus roots likewise. Ibn Battuta wrote in the 14th century about green mango and ginger pickles preserved in salt being served at the Delhi sultanate.
In modern South Asian achaar, mustard oil currently seems more commonly associated with that term than vinegar or brine, and you’ll almost always be looking at fruits and vegetables rather than meat or fish when you open a jar or see what the restaurant has dished up.
If you’d like to make some at home, Kumkum Chatterjee’s quick gur aam achaar (with process photos) on Cookpad shares many flavors with Archana’s long-term preservation aam ka achaar on Cooking with Archana, but Archana’s needs several days to mature and uses more salt for preservation. Dassana Amit of Dassana’s Veg Recipes gives both a traditional version using a ceramic pickle pot and sun-heat and a no-sun-needed variation, at a volume halfway between Kumkum’s and Archana’s. The red chiles listed in all of these recipes are a post-1600s addition, so if you like spice, go for it, and if you’re capsicum averse, you can leave them out and call them extra historic.
The difference between how long you can plan to keep them comes down to how careful you want to be with sterilization and how much salt and oil you want to use. (For long term preservation, pickles should be salty and sour enough to discourage mold and covered with their liquid in a closed jar – whether that liquid is mustard oil, vinegar, brine, or something else. But I’ll leave it to the chemists to specify exactly how salty and how sour is needed for long-term canning.)
Note that when they say “raw” mango here, they don’t mean raw ripe mango. They mean raw still-green mango, which can be a challenge to find if you don’t have a South Asian market nearby – but if you want to experiment with the least-ripe mango you can find at your local market, let me know how it goes! If you can’t find a green-enough mango, you can also make pear achaar with firm underripe pears. You can eat the skin of mangoes, but you might or might not want to based on the mango variety and/or the pesticides.
Quick Low-Spoons Aam ka Achaar
For no-spoons options, several brands offer jarred achaar online, or you may find them as a side at a nearby restaurant. (My local Nepalese restaurant chops the mango seeds into their achaar, much like bone-in chicken taken apart with a cleaver, so I’ve learned to chew with great caution! Sometimes you’re just not prepared for your pickles to have pickle bones.)
This is for a small batch, to save spoons between chopping and cleaning; I have half-pint jars that have seen use for everything from spice blends to violet jelly, and lining up a row of small containers means you can fill several and stop when you run out of ingredients.
- 2 unripe mangoes (or a ripe mango and an unripe pear, or 2 unripe pears), washed, probably peeled, seeded, and cubed
- A couple knobs of jaggery, or several Tbsp honey
- 1-2 tsp salt (start with 1, reserve the 2nd for taste test adjustments)
- 2 tsp vinegar
- (opt) 1/2 to 2 tsp ground black pepper or long pepper for the pre-1600s heat
- 1 Tbsp fresh or candied ginger (or if you use powdered, add 1 tsp powdered to the dry masala below)
- Somewhere up to 2 cups mustard oil depending on how many jars you want to make and cover
- Clean dry glass or ceramic jar(s) with tight fitting lids
Dry masala:
- A couple Tbsp achaar masala or chaat masala (if you have access to a South Asian market)
- OR a couple Tbsp of the atraf al-tib mixture (if you made it)
- OR 1 tsp each of as many as you like of turmeric, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, kalonji, mustard seeds, and powdered ginger if you didn’t have fresh
Cooking is going to take the place of sun drying and slow fermenting here, to have less fidgety spoon-needing bits.
- After cutting up the mangoes and/or pears, rub the salt into them and put them in a strainer to release liquid.
- If any of your dry spices are whole, grind them up.
- Toast the dry masala in a dry pan until fragrant; tip the spices into a bowl and keep aside.
- Heat 1-2 Tbsp mustard oil in the pan and saute the fruit until it begins to soften. If you have fresh or candied ginger, add it here. Taste test for saltiness.
- If you have jaggery, add it with a couple tablespoons of water to melt it. Brown sugar or honey will melt on their own. Add vinegar and some pepper and taste test again, adjusting the general sugar/salt/sour/heat balance to your liking.
- Cook until the jaggery or honey has become a glaze and the fruit is soft but not disintegrating.
- Sprinkle on as much of the dry toasted masala as you like, stirring and tasting as you go. Save any unused masala for your next batch.
- When you’re happy with the flavor balance, remove from heat, let cool, and pour into your clean jar(s), smoothing out the surface and covering with mustard oil to keep the air out. Close and refrigerate.
I recommend refrigerating these and eating within a few weeks because they prioritize quick tastiness over salty fermenting durability. (The higher durability recipes would use a couple tablespoons of salt rather than a couple teaspoons here.)
Lynn Strong 
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