The composition of the pickles - a clove of garlic, a hint of cherry tree leaves and a scatter of mustard seed - to me always seemed like black magic, or rather, green magic. My grandma however, like any respectable Pole, would never dare to omit a single perfecting touch.
Cucumber hunting. A sport for the brave - these beasts have spikes. I can bet that a great many of you didn’t know how cucumbers are grown, what their leaves look like, and that this variety is indeed prickly.
Of course perfectly reasonable winter pickles can be made from store brought cucumbers, they too were once grown in a similar green patch. The smaller the better to ensure that they’ll fit tightly into the jars.
Ingredients: as many small cucumbers as you can get hold of, a few plants of flowering green dill, oak tree leaves, cherry tree leaves, a handful of mustard seeds, horseradish leaves, 2 heads of garlic, salt, water and large glass jars for storage.
Preparing the cauldron comes as a first step. All jars should be washes throughly to ensure that they are clean enough for food storage.
Next, boil a kettle/pot of water and rinse out each jar individually to ensure that they are sterile for the long process. Moving the whole process outside is very helpful - not only do the photos look nicer, the work can be messy and wet.
Once the jars are ready, prepare the ingredients. Thoroughly wash the oak, horeseradish and cheery tree leaves and peal the garlic cloves one by one. Cut the larger ones in half, as in the case of broth, the idea is to let the flavour escape into the liquid.
Assemble the cucumbers into jars. Start off necessarily by plugging in the largest cucumbers and then filling in the spaces on the sides tightly with the remaining smaller ones.
Next, divide the mustard seeds, leaves, fresh dill and garlic among the pickle jars so as to ensure that there is about as much in each as on the photograph.
Lastly, boil a few pots/kettles of water and salt generously, like for pasta cooking. Pour the boiling water into each jar up to the rim and close tightly. Now, store the almost-pickles in a less green cellar, and start reading books to kill the time till winter.
Here’s the end effect - take a little bit of that summer countryside magic home.