2016 May | Sybaritica

Anyone who grew up in Britain will know Branston Pickle very well. We always had a jar in the cupboard at our house when I was a kid and I remember that the condiment was a must have accompaniment to the famous Melton Mowbray style Pork Pie. In Canada, alas, the pickle is not so well known and is less readily available so, for the uninitiated, I will describe it, courtesy of Wikipedia, as ‘a variety of diced vegetables, including swede, carrots, onions, cauliflower and gherkins pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomato, apple and dates with spices such as mustard, coriander, garlic, cinnamon, pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cayenne pepper with sugar’…. The aforementioned ‘swede’, by the way, is better known in Canada and the US as, ‘Rutabaga’…

Many years ago, I noticed that the pickling sauce in Branston Pickle was quite similar in composition and taste to the, also popular, and better known, HP Sauce. I tried to reproduce a Branston Pickle using the sauce (along with extra vinegar and sugar), and, to my surprise, I produced a passably good imitation on the very first try. Successive attempts were less good (chiefly because I tried to ‘improve’ the basic taste), but the general idea was pretty successful, in my opinion.

My earliest attempts used the standard Swede/Rutabaga, along with onion and, occasionally carrot. I never tried gherkins (although I did once use plain cucumber), and I don’t recall ever seeing anything resembling cauliflower in the commercial product; It may be there in very small amounts, but I can’t imagine it making much of a difference and haven’t tried it either. For my most recent batches, I have replaced the Rutabaga with Daikon, which makes a great substitute, and a little onion as well. Carrot could also be added, I suppose, but I don’t think the end result suffers by their omission… Read more