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Pickles allow you to savour meat in a novel form, says Pushpesh Pant
En route Shimla, there is an outlet famous for meat and chicken pickles along with pickled mushrooms that does roaring business in summers and has a loyal following the year round. We picked up a jar on impulse, the product left much to be desired but why complain and not praise the spirit of innovation and enterprise? To return to the lip-smacking achaari theme, gosht or murge ka achaar are products quite different from achaari gosht or murgha. For the pickle, the meat has to be rid of all moisture and then cooked and preserved in oil. It has a fairly long shelf life, subject to usual precautions regarding not letting a wet spoon enter the precincts, etc.
It tastes great hot or cold but must be consumed soon after preparation. Some tandoori masters do at times serve an achaari tikka but more often than not take the easy way out by dousing the poor tikka with oil scrounged out from the tin containers of panchranga and the like. What a pity! Great satisfaction can be derived from tinkering with the recipes and adding or subtracting from the prescribed ingredients to come up with a sensational achaari meat. Pickles are treated as accompaniments and ready-made mass-produced variety always loses out to the nostalgia engendered by homemade species.(Incidentally, when did you last bite into a kala kagazi nimbu or bharwan lal mirch made at home?) Achaari gosht allows the sideshow to become the centrepiece. |
Driving
In
this category can be placed the balchao and other pickled fish
from Mangalore and the adjacent seaboard. It is advisable to wait for a
while for the pickles to mature. The delicacy that appropriates the name
of the pickle is a piquant curry flavoured with spices commonly used in
pickles—mustard, fenugreek and nigella seeds, fennel with generous
measures of lemon juice ensuring that the sour tang is pronounced.