Pickled foods, like so many good things, exist on the margins.
They're little noticed and not much talked about. As toppings or side dishes or barely there elements in some more expansive creation, they occupy a role that's more habitual than attention-getting. There's nothing in them that can sustain a trend or build a buzz or showcase a hot restaurant – pickled foods are always too dependably like themselves in taste and texture to ever generate the feeling of being new and in-the-moment.
And yet when we go looking for perfect comfort foods that resolve the overcomplication of modern eating, these tart, moist, scurvy-fighting objects of limited desire never make the cut. Short on carbs, empty of fat, ungooey and non-infantile to the extreme, they don't fit the profile or satisfy the caloric craving. Let's face it: They're work.
So why am I suddenly realizing, so many years into this lifelong quest for momentary pleasures, how much I love the tang and the juiciness and the sweet-sour trickiness and the sheer surprise of pickled things?
I'd say they sneaked up on me, taking advantage of aging taste buds that need more oomph from every mouthful – while playing to a life-is-short impatience that can't be bothered adapting to the new-found glories of kale and quinoa. But the evidence of my kitchen says they're all around me, that I've been entirely immersed in a culinary sourpuss world without even knowing it.
A burger doesn't exist as an entity until I've topped the patty with a crossing X of garlicky dill-pickle slices. Cabbage rolls, as good as they are in their smoky, Hungarian comfort-food way, need to be embedded in a tangled mass of long-cooked sauerkraut infused with paprika. My local source for Chinese pork-and-chive dumplings supplies sweet-sour vegetable dishes that I order as much for the culinary inventiveness they display as for their unexpected tastiness. Pickled, soured and fermented foods must once have been an unavoidable necessity of brute survival in an unrefrigerated age. And then after centuries of dismal eat-to-live strategies, some brilliant precursor of the cooks at my dumpling restaurant figured out that you could just as easily live to eat.
I can taste that inspired moment in history. If these bracing side dishes and salads didn't completely turn my head and steal my attention, I'd try to figure out how Chinese kitchens come to be serving grated strips of marinated raw potato and carrot in a light garlic vinaigrette, or agrodolce-style warmed napa cabbage or lightly pickled, sweet-sour chunks of fresh green cucumber that are exactly like the middle-Europe version that once made me sit up straight at Bloom's kosher restaurant in London's East End. Before there were trends, there were trade routes.
Pickles, with their innovation-defying ancientness, belong so firmly and confidently to tradition that they can supply added pleasure just by connecting us to our past lives. It's all coming back to me now: Being an Allemang, I ate sauerkraut and smoked sausage as if it were a normal childhood treat. At Christmas, my favourite reward for travelling two hours across Ontario to sit through a family dinner was my grandmother's pickled watermelon rind – more candy than puckery preserve, better attuned to a sugar-saturated young palate, but a good early lesson that pickles can be all-encompassing.
When we have schnitzel at home, now as in my childhood, the thin slice of lard-fried breaded pork is like a warm-up for the thick, succulent slices of beets eaten on their own in the pride-of-place pickle course. Why do I like those beets even more these days? Maybe I just needed a whack of life experience for them to grow on me, or maybe the homemade beets of my younger years were too unpredictable, sometimes veering toward an intensity of sourness that was more preservative than pleasure-giving. I remember feeling the same breathtaking aversion to old-timey pickled onions, pickled eggs and rollmop herring served as a test of manhood in the low-fun pubs of yesteryear, a reminder why pickles still have some explaining to do.
Fortunately, my pickled world expanded as other, gentler cultures shared their resources. I couldn't help but feel joy when I came across the pickled pink turnip, coloured with beet juice to make this soured root vegetable at once benign and eye-catching, that is sold in bulk at Middle Eastern grocery stores. Like many students, I'd first encountered it deep within a pita pouch as the crunch in my shawarma sandwich, but back then it was just an anonymous ingredient, a contrasting component of freshness in a messy mouthful of long-cooked meat.
Now, when I taste it on its own – moist, chunky, aromatic and barely bitter thanks to pickling's transformation, invigorating in its refusal to defer or bend – I immediately feel like I've come out of a long trance. It's a state of alertness that pickled foods are designed to create, a heightened moment of what-just-hit-me that jerks the senses back to life. You can't eat these tiny foods mindlessly as if they're potato chips (and I say this as one of the world's most mindful potato-chip eaters). You have to slow down; you can't help but taste them. Pickles make me think, I tell people. But what I really mean in my preference-for-the-margins way is that most foods prevent you from thinking – their easy comforts fill the spaces of questioning where thoughts would normally go.
Pickled foods are the challengers, the sometimes sour non-conformists, the contented contrarians – maybe we all end up resembling the foods we love.