Pickled onions - ancient and modern

Pickling was cling-film to the ancients, Sue Quinn, The Guardian

After my lunch at the Kooyong Tennis Club, at which Anthea and I talked about food a bit, she sent me her favourite recipe for pickled onions (and some others}. And I slotted it away in my head to bring out for the blog sometime - and to make as well, next time I saw some suitable onions. (The other recipes will also get their time in the sun.) They have been sitting on my computer desktop waiting for retrieval. Then when we had lunch in the Yarra Valley the other day, in the trendy Tramonto, there on the platter of local goodies were some pickled onions. So I decided that this was the time to do pickled onions on my blog. For they are indeed becoming trendy, in every way - from variations on the traditional - shown above - to tasty relishes and salads that owe more to the orient than to the British. And apparently this is happening in England too.

"The point is that more British chefs – and therefore more home cooks – are sexing up their menus and tickling our palates by giving ancient techniques a fresh spin." Sue Quinn, The Guardian

I will return to the traditional, but first I might turn to what the trendies are doing with pickled onions. I shall stick to onions because the subject of pickling as a whole is just too vast. And I think this is going to be a recipe heavy post as there is not really an awful lot to say about the history and social aspects - well maybe a tiny bit.

Most of the modern versions are pretty quick to prepare, as most of them are just soaking sliced onions in some kind of acid - I will hand over to the super trendy Yotam Ottolenghi to explain:

"I’m talking about quick-pickled onions, which, with the help of vinegar or citrus juice, a little sugar, some salt and a whole range of potential aromatics, offer a marvellously effortless way to inject all kinds of dishes with an oniony freshness that transforms them.

The magic is that the onions soften, sweeten and, for an extra visual ta-da!, turn bright pink. The differences between today’s recipes are an indication of the versatility of quick-pickled onions. You’re now set to get yourself out of many pickles when next you ponder how to spruce up a cheese sandwich or what to pile on top of fried fish." Yotam Ottolenghi

So here are a few examples of this kind of recipe - most of which, to my mind, are based on the Indian onion relish that you get served with curry. I'm not quite sure why they would turn pink, unless you used red onions or beetroot as well. But anyway ... Click here to see how Yotam Ottolenghi does it and what he does with them.

Donna Hay also has a very simple version that uses dill and lemon - she used them to top some crispy fried salmon - the fired fish that Ottolenghi was talking about:

2 red onions, finely sliced 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice 2 tbsp superfine granulated sugar 1/3 cup dill sprigs sea salt and cracked pepper

In a medium bowl, combine the onions, lemon juice, sugar, dill sprigs and a generous amount of salt and pepper, tossing well. Marinate for a while before serving.

Jamie Oliver also has a version - he sucks you in by calling it Instant Pickled Onions, and the photograph shows how this kind of pickle is mostly used - on an antipasto platter, or a ploughman's lunch, to accompany cheese and crusty bread.

It is indeed pretty quick but hardly instant as these are cooked, whereas both Donna Hay and Yotam Ottolenghi merely leave their onions to soak and soften.

Jamie does, however, have another, quicker alternative, called, in typical Jamie fashion: Pickly cucumber and red onion salad with loads of dill, (shown at right). Recipe follows:

Scratch a fork down and all around the length of a cucumber, then slice it on an angle into 1cm slices and put the slices into a bowl. Grate over half a peeled red onion, using the coarse side of a box grater. Add a few generous splashes of white wine vinegar and pinch or two of sea salt. Pick and roughly chop a very small bunch of fresh dill and sprinkle over. Leave for about 30 minutes to get cold and to marinate, if you can, before serving with a drizzle of raoeseed/extra virgin olive oil and a few good squeezes of lemon juice. Have a taste, adjust the seasoning if necessary and serve. (I think I would slice the cucumbers more thinly.)

As you can tell dill is a popular herb to use in pickles.

Luke Nguyen (being Vietnamese) prefers Vietnamese mint and he serves it with a chicken roulade which is also flavoured with Vietnamese mint. It's from his book on France. Here is the recipe for the pickled onions - not for the chicken. You'll have to buy the book for that - it's not online I'm afraid.

100ml white vinegar, 100g sugar, 1 onion, thinly sliced, 10 Vietnamese mint leaves.

Combine the vinegar and sugar in a mixing bowl, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Add the onion and Vietnamese mint, ensuring the onion is coated in the mixture. Cover and leave to pickle for 2 hours, then strain. Simple.

A spicier version is from Beverley Sutherland Smith.

3 large onions, either white or red, 1 cup extra light olive oil, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon ground cumin, 1 teaspoon ground turmeric, 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon white pepper.

Cut onions in half, and then into very thin slices. Mix all there emaining ingredients in a bowl large enough to hold all the onion. Add the onion slices and stir so they are thoroughly coated with the mixture. Leave this at room temperature and give it a stir several times over the next few hours. Transfer to the refrigerator and cover. Leave for at least a day before using, stirring once each day. As the onion softens, there will be quite a lot of liquid around it, so before serving drain the onion slightly, leaving it moist.

Then there is a 'posh' version from an English chef called Paul Foster - Beer pickled onions which look very cheffy and delicious.

But as I said, at the beginning of this section really all of these kind of recipes seem to me to emanate from the east. I first came across them in Indian restaurants in England, and today I still make an extremely simple onion salad when we have curry. It's just sliced onions in white wine vinegar really. Sometimes I add a bit of tomato or a bit of cucumber and some mint or coriander, but it's often very plain, and the perfect foil for spicy Indian food. Of course the classic salad of this type is kachumber and if you Google it you will find plenty of recipes - and really it deserves a post of its own, so I won't give a recipe here.

"In Britain, our favourite pickles are strongly influenced by Indian achars, and the most used pickling vinegar for the last century has been full-flavoured dark malt vinegar, which holds up well to the addition of spices (although you might equally go for a good quality cider vinegar). For a more authentic Nordic pickle, white wine or white vinegar does well, while Asian pickles are often made with rice vinegar." Chloe King - Great British Chefs

So back to the pickled onions that I grew up with and which my mother and grandmother used to make from some handed down recipe. We would eat them on their own, with cheese, with fish and chips - very British but we did love them. Heaven knows how old my mother's recipe was, though I have to confess I don't have it. So here is Anthea's recipe which I think sounds much like how we used to make it. I remember peeling all those onions and weeping as we went. It was very tedious because they are so small and you are usually doing heaps of them. You need those small pickling onions, and traditionally it is made with malt vinegar. I don't remember putting the onions to soak in brine with the peel on first though. I think we peeled them and then soaked them in the brine. I also don't remember the sugar, but virtually all the recipes I saw had some sugar in them, so we probably did.

Anthea's recipe

1lb small pickling onions

1 Pint of Brine (2ozs of Salt to 1 pint of Water)

Cold spiced vinegar to cover onions.

Place the onions unpeeled into a mixing bowl and cover with the brine. Set aside for 12 hours. Then drain and peel the onions. With another pint of fresh brine, cover and set aside for 2 days. Drain thoroughly and pack in jars.

Cover the onions with 1 tablespoon of brown sugar for each jar. Add cold spiced vinegar to fill the jar. Shake the jar to dissolve the sugar. Put screw tops on and seal and label.

I checked out a few other recipes online just to see and there seems to be a tiny bit of variety in whether you soak them with the peel on beforehand or not - one recipe poured boiling water over them to ease getting the skins off. They also varied with the kind of vinegar they used - though it was mostly malt vinegar - and the spices - whether you put them in with the onions or with the vinegar. Some heated the vinegar, some didn't. I think we used to buy a mix called pickling spices - not sure whether that still exists. But some recipes were more specific about the spice mix used.

So I hope that this has given you ideas if not actual recipes. And I forgot to say that one of the trendy things about them is that we have now discovered that pickled things are extremely good for you and good for the gut - probiotic even. Smelly though.

Thanks Anthea. She tells me they make really good presents for people. Will give it a go next time I see some pickling onions in the market.