Monish Gujral’s Pickle Trail Is A Global Odyssey With 100 Recipes

NEW DELHI, (IANS) – Did you know that eggs can be pickled, and so can salmon, cucumber, okra (bhindi), tomatoes, brinjal and oranges – to name just a few?

Prominent restauranter, author and columnist Monish Gujral, in his new book, ‘On the Pickle Trail – 100 recipes from around the World’ (Penguin/Ebury Press), that has been nominated for the World Cookbook Awards to be held in Sweden in May, takes you on a dizzying journey that will have you craving for more. Says he:

During one of the Gourmand award ceremonies in China, where I had gone to receive the award for my book, ‘On the Dessert Trail’, my friend Marlena Spieler, who is a food writer and journalist, started chatting about different types of pickles.

It was then the idea to write a book on pickles came to my mind. I remember my grandmother drying turnips, carrots, and cauliflower in the sun in winter to make a delicious sweet and sour pickle and mango pickles in summer which we would relish all around the year but now with growth of nuclear families where we are all consumed with corporate competition, this art of home cooking is dying.

I have always advocated and promoted home artisanal cooking, which is at an all-time low because of the charms of the retail world. I wanted to propagate the importance of fermented foods in our diet and how pickles help us improve our gut health. Pickles are mostly fermented and are rich in probiotic bacteria that help in digestion and enhance the immune system.

There are many culinary social media online platforms where the community is more than happy to interact which helped me a great deal to research for my book. Throughout my travels in India and abroad, I interacted with people especially some homemakers, friends, and colleagues in search of global pickles and recipes. All of them proved to be invaluable resources as they often provided direct answers and pointed me in the right direction to find my answers,” Gujral elaborated.

Pickling has been a source of food preservation for centuries and the artisanal techniques of pickling and fermentation are the essence of this book, which showcases the tangy world of pickles that may tickle your fancy. The recipes in this book combine simple pickling and fermentation methods that make them very accessible to people who want to try their hands at making some very interesting global pickles, which is my main purpose to have written this book so as to promote home artisanal cooking.