October 29, 2012
Amuse-Bouche
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concombre et radis
(cucumber and radish)
Pickle is a fascinating word. As a verb it means to preserve food in vinegar, brine, or a similar solution. As a noun it can mean the results of the above verb, or the solution the noun was pickled in. As a synonym, the noun can mean plight, predicament, mess, difficulty, trouble, dire⁄desperate straits, problem, quandary, tight corner, tight spot, jam, fix, scrape, bind, hole, hot water, or even a fine kettle of fish. When a person drinks too much, they are pickled.
In late Middle English, the word denoted a spicy sauce served with meat. By the 18th century, the Royal Navy was using it as a term for rubbing salt into the wounds of sailors that were flogged or whipped to further the punishment. There have been eight ships in the Royal Navy named HMS Pickle. William H. Pickle was the 37th United States Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Christina Pickles is a British-born American actress. There is a game called Pickle-in-the Middle, which when I was lad was called Keep Away and was designed to taunt me. In 1751, Tobias Smollett wrote the novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. There’s a Pickle Lake in Ontario, Canada. As a child, my son enjoyed the Pickle Family Circus. Pickling can also be a treatment for metal to remove stains or rust.
I’ve always enjoyed a cold, crisp dill pickle. Some time in the mid-1970s, I found Claussen-brand pickles in refrigerator of my grocery store and became a happy person. Unlike the other pickles available, these were simply fresh-pickled cucumbers. These were the most like delicatessen pickles I had ever tasted. Other brands cooked the cucumbers so they could be stored and sold unrefrigerated which meant the weren’t as crunchy.
In the mid-1990s, I was referred to a recipe in Bon Appétit magazine for Spicy Dill Pickles. Since then, all my pickles have been homemade, and I have abandoned Claussen. Last year, I started playing around with using miso for pickling. In Japanese, the end product is called misozuke, or miso pickles. If I have a few pieces of just about any vegetable or seafood laying around, into the miso tub it goes. The results have been interesting.
Thus, the day I found myself with a single Kirby cucumber, the variety I use for pickles, reposing in my vegetable bin, into the tub of shiro miso it went. Then I forgot about it. A few weeks later I pulled a shrunken, bright-green pickle from the water that now surrounded it in the miso. Much of the water that was originally in the cucumber had decided to take up residence elsewhere. The pickle now had a cross-section that looked a bit like a three-lobe dog bone. Although it looked a bit emaciated, the texture was crunchy. The taste was still that of a cucumber, but the acidity was rounded out and there was a slight miso taste to it. Wow.
The next time I found some small, pickling cucumbers in the store, I picked up half a dozen. On that same visit, I found a bunch of bright-red globe radishes for a quarter. After washing and trimming, these also wound up buried in miso.
After a two-week wait, both the cucumbers and radishes were ready. The second batch of cucumbers resembled the first. The radishes had only a slight reddish color left, a shriveled appearance due to water loss, and a mild, slightly salty flavor. Their allyl-isothiocyanate-induced sharpness was mostly gone.
I thought about a variety of ways to combine the two pickles on a plate, but in the end, I decided on simply a single radish and a thick slice of cucumber. (Both went exceedingly well with the champagne we were drinking.)

© 2012 Peter Hertzmann. All rights reserved.