Skip to content

All storiesHollin · No. 14, Salt

Food

Brine, slowly

Everything a pickle needs is salt, water and time. Our food editor on the jars that line her kitchen from September to spring, with a recipe for the simplest one.

Words by Marta QuellPhotographs by Tobias Reyne3 min read

Glass jars of vegetables pickling in cloudy brine on a worn wooden table, with sprigs of dill, black peppercorns and a small bowl of coarse grey salt
Cucumbers, carrots and the last of the green beans, a week into their brine. The cloudiness is a good sign.

There is a week in late September when my kitchen smells like a harbour. The windows steam up, every surface is covered in jars, and the bowl of salt on the table empties faster than I can fill it. It is the week I put the summer away.

I don’t mean vinegar pickles, though I make those too. I mean the old way: vegetables under a salt brine, left at room temperature until the bacteria that live on their skins turn some of their sugar into acid. It is the slowest cooking I know, and the least effort. You do almost nothing, and then you wait.

Two per cent, more or less

The only number worth remembering is two. A brine of about two per cent salt by weight, twenty grams to a litre of water, is enough to keep the wrong bacteria out and let the right ones get on with it. Less, and things go soft. More, and they go slowly, which isn’t always a bad thing in a warm kitchen.

The cloudiness that frightens people the first time is the whole point. It means something is alive in there.

I use the grey salt from Morrow Ness for this, partly out of loyalty and partly because I think the minerals in it help the cucumbers stay crisp. I have no evidence for that at all.

The simplest jar

For a one-litre jar you need:

  • about 600 g of small, firm cucumbers, washed, ends trimmed
  • 2 cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of dill, a teaspoon of black peppercorns
  • a vine, oak or blackcurrant leaf, if you have one (the tannins keep things crunchy)
  • 20 g of coarse sea salt dissolved in 1 litre of cool water

Pack the cucumbers tightly into the jar with the garlic, dill and pepper, tuck the leaf on top, and pour over enough brine to cover everything by a finger’s width. Weigh it down with a small glass or a clean stone in a bag, so nothing floats up into the air. Cover loosely and leave on a plate (it will bubble over) somewhere out of the sun.

After three days, taste one. After five, taste another. When they’re sour enough for you, put the lid on properly and move the jar to the fridge, where it will keep, slowing all the time, until about February.

By then the jars on my shelf are mostly empty, and I start to look forward to the cucumbers of next summer. That, I think, is what preserving is really for. Not to make food last forever, just long enough to want it again.

End of story.

From No. 14, Salt

More from this issue

  • Shallow rectangular salt pans on a grey tidal flat at low tide, a wooden rake leaning on a low clay wall and small heaps of white salt drying

    Places

    The salt pans at Morrow Ness

    For three generations the Marsh family has raked sea salt by hand from a strip of tidal flat that most maps leave blank. Ada Marsh shows us how slow a summer can be.

    Words by Elin Varga · 3 min read

  • An old dented pewter salt cellar with a tiny horn spoon on a folded off-white linen cloth, coarse grey sea salt inside

    Craft

    A short history of the salt cellar

    For centuries the dish that held the salt told everyone at the table exactly where they stood. Then it shrank, got a lid and disappeared into the shaker. A small object, and a long story.

    Words by Owen Hale · 3 min read

  • Inside a small old smokehouse, rows of split fish hanging from wooden rods in soft blue smoke, with soot-black brick walls and a shaft of daylight

    Conversations

    Forty winters at the smokehouse

    Ida Brann has smoked fish in the same brick shed at Saltcote since 1986. She talked to us about oak, patience, and why she still won't use a thermometer.

    Words by Ruth Calder · 2 min read

The Sunday Letter

A short letter every other Sunday: what we're reading, what's on the desk and one story from the archive. Free, and easy to leave.

Hollin
Subscribe

Ask the archive

Answers from every story and issue

Hello from the granary! Ask me about a story, which issue something was in, or how subscriptions work.

Accent