Cooking For Engineers

[RobNYNY1957]

When I eat in Indian restaurant, there is usally a small condiment bowl of something that is usually called "pickles". Greenish vegetables in a sticky sauce, sometimese with some hard vegetable material pieces, with an indescribable flavor, like nothing else I have ever tasted. Small amounts of it are enough to flavor quite a bit of food. It's not peppery, it's not really sour. I just don't know how to describe the taste (metallic)? Does anyone know what it is made of and how it is flavored?

[Watt]

Rob, it is difficult to say which pickle you are talking about from your description, but here are a few thoughts.

Many Indian pickles use lime juce/salt as a preservative, but quite a few use oil as well. This is often mustard oil, and when combined with lime juice and heated with spices, forms an emulsion-like fluid, inwhich the vegetables/fruits are matured.

Pickles of this kind may be made with limes, mango (the small unripe green kind) gunda (very small mango?) chillies and some are mixed veg/fruit. The result, after 4 weeks maturation is slightly sour, usually chilli hot and highly spiced with mustard seed and fenugreek seed.

Let me know if you want a recipe to 'roll yur own'.