“Do you grow?”
Sorry, but I can’t talk about vegetables without quoting Withnail and I – a policy I’d like to see enforced in supermarkets. “I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. Have you got your own bags?”
To paraphrase George Jones and Elvis Costello, it’s been a good year for the root crops – in my veggie patch anyway. I’ve had potatoes, carrots and beetroot like I’ve never had before but this week I found myself down to my last couple of spuds, which made me ponder how our ancestors must have felt when they came to this time of year and the abundance of harvest time began to dwindle.
They preserved, of course, in a number of clever ways. But the storage of fruit and vegetables without deep freezing is a fine art, as I discovered when I tried to follow the time honoured method of storing apples by laying them out carefully in paper in a drawer. If you’ve never tried it, don’t bother. Next time I opened the drawer I was greeted with what looked like a collection of shrunken heads, each apple having shrivelled to the size and consistency of a pickled walnut. They’d only been in there two years.
A more reliable method is pickling, though it does tend to sour the taste of your apple. Pickling has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Indeed, I recently found a jar of Branston’s in the back of a cupboard that dated back to 2,400BC. It went perfectly with my Mesopotamian cheddar.
For more than 4,000 years, pickles have been a favourite nibble of everyone from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I. Julius Caesar and Napoleon conquered whole swathes of Europe with armies fed on pickles. But then they didn’t have much choice. Come winter it was either pickle up or starve. To keep the wolf quite literally from the door, the pagan’s used to hang pickles on pine trees – the precursor of the Christmas bauble. So it’s testimony to the tangy taste of pickles that their popularity was not dented by the invention of the fridge; and, in fact, they continued to develop in style and variety right up to the point where even Paul Newman and Barry Norman got in on the act. Today the Americans consume an average of 9lb of pickles per head every year.
This week they celebrated National Pickle Day. Yes, there is a National Pickle Day. If you ever get tired of Halloween, maybe think about adopting this quaint little Americanism instead. It takes place on November 14th every year and, as far as I can tell, consists of a few blokes on New York’s Lower East Side dressing up as items out of an Ann Summers catalogue, which I presume are supposed to look like pickled cucumbers. Maybe not one for the children.
London should hold its own Pickle Day, if only so we can parade down Piccadilly dressed as piccalilli. Which raises the question, which of those two strange words came first? You would assume one was influenced by the other but it seems not. Both words are as mysterious as each other when it comes to etymology. But to cut a long and inconclusive story short, Piccadilly appears to have derived from peccadillo (from the Spanish meaning little sin), via a style of shirt collar, whereas piccalilli came from pickle, which stemmed from the Dutch pekel, and apparently with no deliberate reference to the London street. Which is mysterious.
The other mystery involving pickles – or rather Pickles – was the shocking disappearance of the Jules Rimet Trophy (aka the World Cup) in 1966, just weeks before England were due to win it. The trophy, which had been stolen from a stamp exhibition at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, was miraculously found a week later in a hedge in Beulah Hill by a dog called Pickles. I say miraculously because the dog didn’t follow football and wasn’t even aware the trophy had gone missing.
Ten years later, yet another mystery. I was lying on the wooden floor of a school hall in relative darkness, my eyes closed, breathing slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth and trying to empty my mind. We had an RE teacher, see, who was years ahead of his time. Once a week he tutored us in mindfulness meditation, though we didn’t call it that at the time. As we lay there absorbing the peace and practising the art of letting go, the silence was shattered by the sound of the wind ripping through a boy’s shorts like the bellow of an angry elephant. I guess you’d call it an out of body experience.
Nobody confessed, as we rolled on the floor and clutched our sides, but the clever money was on my friend Dave, newly arrived from America and an expert in the art of letting go. His surname?
Pickles.
