🖊 Two tales of two pickles

We have two pickle-focused pieces for you this week! Our first is from Sohel Sarkar on the Indian pickle sandwiches of her childhood, eaten while adults weren’t looking. The second is from Karen Resta

The pickle sandwiches of India

This ubiquitous sandwich is different in every hand by Sohel Sarkar

Talk to anyone about pickles in India, and they will tell you that paired with rice and dahi, khichri, or some aloo parathas, they constitute their go-to comfort food. Prod a little further, and some of them will wax rhapsodic about a lesser known but equally beloved snack: the pickle sandwich. At its most basic, it is two slices of bread with a spoonful of pickle – of mangoes, carrots, dates, prawns or meat… the possibilities are endless. The taste of a pickle sandwich is the taste of childhood.

Some of us ate them sneakily, away from the radar of disapproving adults (these aren’t exactly the healthiest snacks). The more fortunate ones were allowed them as an occasional indulgence, and even found them packed in school lunches, presumably because parents were having a busy day. I was in the former camp, using the hot summer afternoons during school break to furtively scoop a mango or ginger pickle out of my grandmother’s jars to spread on bread, devouring them while keeping an ear out for approaching footsteps. Later, when I was older, I experimented with using tomatoes for freshness, or adding boiled eggs or grilled chicken to cut through the hot and sour pickle.

‘If sandwiches passed from the coloniser to the colonised, Elizabeth Collingham in her book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors suggests that pickles travelled in the opposite direction’

It’s hard to tell how and when achaar found its way into a sandwich, but in a country obsessed with pairing every imaginable form of carbohydrate – rice, rotis, parathas, idlis – with a pickle, bread is an easy substitute. The concept of factory-made sliced bread arrived with the British coloniser – joining India’s chapatis, pooris and naan – as did the sandwich itself. ‘Native’ Indian cooks imprinted this classic English snack, synonymous with tea time, picnics and garden parties, with their own culinary ingenuity and imagination.