Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

�of pickles, piccalilli and peccadillos.�

Sometimes, a quote, a word, a phrase, or a sentence gets stuck inside my brain, and although I can’t ever find its origins, it won’t go away until I spend a good amount of time thinking about it and researching it. One of these is “of pickles, piccalilli and peccadillos.” I don’t where that came from. Maybe it was injected into me by Peter Piper or some mischievous elf.

I believe the last word in “of pickles, piccalilli and peccadillos” should be piccadillos, since the other two are food items and peccadillos mean little sins or slight offenses in Spanish. Piccadillos, on the other hand, are vegetables made into little cubes, combined with ground meat, onions, garlic, and spices.

Pickles, should have their own chapter, for we all know what they are, since they are worldwide; therefore, piccalilli has to be the subject at this time. The dictionary definition of piccalilli is: “a pickled relish made of various chopped vegetables and hot spices” Some say piccalilli is really a green tomato relish.

This side dish is made from unblemished, round and very hard tomatoes and is used as an embellishment for roast meats, vegetables and some rice dishes. There must be something slightly naughty about this dish, because I found a recipe for it where the green tomatoes were named as devil’s fruit. This relish was sometimes served with the Christmas dinner and it has been lurking around our cuisine since the middle nineteen hundreds.

Piccalilli is made by grinding and mixing cored and ground or finely minced green tomatoes, green and red peppers, onions, hot jalapeño peppers and salt. After letting this mixture sit for a few hours, it is drained and all the excess moisture is squeezed out. White vinegar, sugar, mustard and celery seeds are simmered for about fifteen minutes. Then the vegetable mixture is added, brought to boil, and sealed inside sterilized jars.

Judging from the recipe, piccalilli is a pickle or some sort of a pickle, but it has to wait until next Christmas to be tried by me. That is, if I can get a hold of some green tomatoes at this time of the year.