Everyone pickles, but only some pickle fish and meat, writes Sohel Sarkar.
For Christina Kinny, the taste of kolim balchao is inseparable from memories of her grandmother bringing home tiny baby shrimps called ‘kolim’ in the pallu of her nine-yard sari. “She would spend hours bent over the edges of Kanjurmarg’s marshlands [in Mumbai] to collect a handful of this delicacy, and then pickle it over the next few days,” she recalls. The kolim was first mixed with salt (this step skipped for saltwater kolim), wrapped and hung in a muslin cloth, and left to dry for three to four days. The dried kolim was then tossed with ground, sun-dried red chillies, ginger and garlic along with cumin, chilli powder, and oil. Finally, the mixture was packed into urns, tightly sealed and allowed to rest for the next few days. It would last nearly eight months.
“My grandmother never wanted to share the recipe,” Christina says, “though I ultimately managed to get it.” It’s a good thing she did, since kolim balchao is missing from even the most comprehensive documentation of the cuisine of Mumbai’s East Indian community, to which Christina belongs.
The East Indian Cookery Book, published by the Bombay East Indian Association in 1981, compiles over 300 closely guarded family recipes, but makes no mention of this one. That omission may reflect the hyperlocal nature of kolim balchao, a pickle likely born among communities settled in saltpan-adjacent areas like Kanjurmarg, where both baby shrimps and the salt to preserve them were once abundant. This unique convergence of place and ingredient perhaps confined the recipe to oral tradition, away from the formal culinary record of a cookbook.
For Christina, it is her grandmother’s orally passed down version that allows her to keep this niche pickling tradition alive. Even as baby shrimps become harder to harvest in Mumbai’s rapidly shrinking marshlands, kolim balchao makes an occasional appearance on East Indian Cozinha, Christina’s small-batch label that has been retailing prawn, Bombay duck (bombil), and other East Indian pickles for nearly a decade.
From mango, chilli, and lime to starfruit, soya chunks, and even green apple, few ingredients have escaped the pickling proclivities of resourceful communities and homecooks in India. Usha’s Pickle Digest, a cookbook that documents over a thousand pickle recipes from across the country, is testament to our voracious appetite for these sour-salty-sweet-tangy-spicy concoctions. But this encyclopaedic text that has earned its author Usha Prabhakaran the title of India’s ‘Pickle Queen’ is preoccupied with the pickling of fruits and vegetables, ignoring the fish and meat pickles that are beloved in many regional cuisines.
While the East Indian and Goan kitchens love their fish pickles, Kerala has had a long history of pickling beef in vinegar, sesame oil, asafoetida, chillies, garlic, ginger, fenugreek, and mustard. Both the Kodagu region of Karnataka and the northeastern state of Nagaland pickle pork, albeit differently. Maharashtra has mutton lonche, Andhra boasts of korameenu (murrel) pickle, and meat ka achaar is popular in parts of north India.
These recipes may be absent from mainstream cookbooks like Usha’s Pickle Digest but they are part of older community collections, points out Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, culinary consultant and author. Indeed, the East Indian Cookery Book reproduces recipes for dried prawn balchao and dried bombil pickle. BF Varughese’s iconic Recipe For All Occasions, first published in 1974, records recipes for Kerala fish pickle, minced meat pickle, and pork pada, among many others. The Goan Cookery Book by PFJ De Souza— written in Konkani and published in 1917—lists balchaos made with prawns and duck eggs while Maria Teresa Menezes’ The Essential Goa Cookbook, published as recently as 2000, has many iterations of pickled prawns.
“Our traditional pickles were a way to use up large quantities of meat,” says Rushina. Her in-laws, based in Uttarakhand, had a tradition of pickling game meat going back to a time when hunting was not outlawed. “You would not cook the whole animal at once unless it was for a feast. So the best cuts were used in curries and the rest was pickled,” she explains. As with all pickles, these were born out of resourcefulness and a drive to avoid waste. “Those days you didn’t go to the market to buy specific cuts of meat. So when an animal came, it was optimised as much as possible.”
These days, Rushina uses the old family recipe of meat ka achaar to make a mutton pickle. But she notes that meat pickles were never widespread in Uttarakhand. “As a preservation method, pickling is strongly influenced by climate. Across the Himalayan region, meat lasts longer and smoking is more common [than pickling],” she explains. In contrast, tropical and coastal areas have a more well-entrenched tradition of pickling fish and meat.
Sun, salt, vinegar: Everyone’s got a method
Every summer, Goans stock up on dried prawns and mackerel in anticipation of the monsoon, when fresh fish, integral to their coastal cuisine, isn’t readily available. Some of this dried fish ends up in pickles. For the East Indian community too, drying and pickling fish is a summer activity.
Christina traces the earliest iteration of the East Indian bombil pickle to when women would roast dried Bombay duck on the dying embers of the chulha after the day’s cooking was done. The roasted dry fish was then ground into a chutney. Another inspiration for the present-day bombil pickle is the bombil atlela, still eaten today, where dried Bombay duck is marinated with garlic, bottle masala, tamarind, and oil, and left to cook in its own juices. In her own version of the pickle, Christina washes the dried fish in vinegar, deep-fries it, and coats it with spices and vinegar along with salt, sugar, and a little jaggery.
Prawns are pickled in two ways in East Indian cuisine. For sore prawn pickle, large prawns (typically tiger prawns) are dried in the sun till they’re rock-hard. Once pickled, these last six to eight months. In the other method, fresh prawns are fried and pickled, giving a shelf life of 10 to 15 days.
The Portuguese influence—the seven islands of Bombay and the town of Bassein (now Vasai) were controlled by the Portuguese between the 16th and 17th centuries before being acquired by the British—shows up in the generous use of vinegar. Except for kolim balchao, where salt is the key preservative, almost all East Indian pickles use vinegar as the main souring, flavouring, and preservation agent.
You would not cook the whole animal at once unless it was for a feast. So the best cuts were used in curries and the rest was pickled.
This links them closely to Goan pickles, where the Portuguese connection runs deeper, with over four centuries of colonisation. Christina credits the vindaloo, a Portuguese-origin dish equally popular in Goan and East Indian cuisines, as a precursor to most pickles in the region. In fact, both the vindaloo and the sorpotel, with their vinegary base and longer shelf life, are “de facto pickles,” agrees Delhi-based Crescentia Scolt Fernandes, who makes and sells Goan pickles under Crescentia’s Kitchen.
Like kolim balchao, Goans make a paste-like pickle with dried baby shrimps, locally known as galmo, though here, vinegar, not salt, is the main preservative. In both communities, this raw pickle is sauteed with onions, or cooked in other ways, before eating. In Goa, pickled galmo is sometimes added to prawn balchao (similar to the East Indian balchao) to enhance its flavour.
Beyond the balchao—typically made with dried prawns and occasionally pork—Goan cuisine includes para (or parra), a pickle made with dried saltwater fish like mackerel. The fish is washed in vinegar, then mixed with ground dried red chillies, ginger, garlic, peppercorns, cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, and more vinegar. “This is left to cure for at least 30-40 days. The longer it stays, the better it tastes,” says Crescentia.
A third preparation, mole or molho, allows fresh fish to be preserved. Its base is similar to Goan recheado masala, cooked with vinegar. The fish is fried separately and, once cooled, put into this base, where it keeps like a pickle. Mole can be made with large prawns, beef or pork too, though the last two are rarer.
Ironically, Crescentia, who once ran a Goan pickle factory in Delhi, was initiated into the cuisine only after marriage. She comes from the Dutch-Portuguese community in Kochi, Kerala, which shares some similarities with Goan cuisine, including a strong Portuguese influence. “We make a fish pada in Kerala too, but it uses slightly different spices and is left to rest for a week at most,” says Crescentia. While Goan pickles get their distinctive flavour from coconut vinegar, made by fermenting toddy, Kerala’s Dutch-Portuguese community rely on vinegar made from Kerala bananas.
Coconut vinegar is widely used in Kerala as well, though Sheila Chacko Kallivayalil, who runs Sheila’s Pickles and Jams, prefers synthetic vinegar in her pickles. Besides prawns and seer fish, Sheila pickles veluri, a seasonal fish that, she says, is both flavourful and holds up well against deep-frying. “You have to fry the fish before pickling, or else the water content can make the pickle spoil faster,” she says. “Since I don’t use preservatives apart from vinegar, I can’t afford to take that risk.” Her fish pickles are based on recipes passed down by her mother and grandmother, but Sheila points out that the basic fish pickle is so ubiquitous in Kerala that most families share the same method and ingredients.
Not everyone’s (pickle) recipes are documented
Across northeastern India, pork pickles enjoy a similar ubiquity. Cynthia Doley, who runs Meram Pickles with her mother on the island of Majuli in Assam, started the brand less than a year ago with three offerings—smoked pork, shredded chicken, and shredded pork. Unlike in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, meat-based pickles are not common in Assam, but Cynthia’s family belongs to the Mising community, who trace their ancestry back to Arunachal. Meram’s pork pickles are a nod to those origins.
Their recipes are not strictly traditional Mising fare but draw from pickling practices across northeastern states. That cross-regional fluidity exists partly because, as Cynthia points out, “a lot of our tribal cuisines are not recorded in cookbooks. Unless you learn them from your parents and grandparents, you won’t know about the traditional herbs we use in our pickles or how to smoke pork before pickling.”
Over time, the mother-daughter duo has added vegetarian options, such as bamboo shoot, king chilli, jujube, and Indian olives, to Meram’s repertoire, but pork pickles remain their bestsellers. While most of their customers are from the northeastern states, Cynthia notes that a sizeable number are from southern cities like Bengaluru, parts of Kerala, Goa, and more recently, Mumbai and Pune. “In these places, the food habits are similar, so they find a sense of familiarity in the taste,” she adds.
It’s not hard to imagine why recipes for fish and meat pickles, commonplace in older cookbooks, rarely appear in contemporary ones. In some cases, the ingredients themselves are vanishing. Christina calls kolim balchao “an endangered recipe” because of the difficulty of sourcing baby shrimps in Mumbai’s fast-disappearing marshlands. “Now, I have to get it from the outskirts of the city, like Palghar or Vasai, where the waters are not as polluted as in Kanjurmarg,” Christina says. Sheila echoes the sentiment—seasonal fish like veluri are becoming more erratic and harder to find.
Cost and time are factors too. Fish and meat are expensive, and pickling requires days of prep, sun-drying or smoking, and resting. Cookbook authors may opt for quicker and more testable recipes. “So just by convenience selection, these recipes might have been dropped,” Rushina suggests.
Christina calls kolim balchao “an endangered recipe” because of the difficulty of sourcing baby shrimps in Mumbai’s fast-disappearing marshlands. “Now, I have to get it from the outskirts of the city, like Palghar or Vasai, where the waters are not as polluted as in Kanjurmarg.
What’s more, the sheer diversity of flavours available to the contemporary consumer may be edging out the need for pickles, she adds. “At one point, pickles and chutneys either replaced or extended salt, which was expensive or not easily available. Now that we have easy access to salt and spices, we don’t really depend on pickles to add flavour to food.”
Among her in-laws, meat ka achaar still survives, but only as a rare indulgence. “With refrigeration and curated cuts of meat on supermarket shelves, it’s something we do out of nostalgia for the flavours rather than any imperative to preserve.”
Others may satiate this nostalgia with commercial options off supermarket shelves, even if they don’t quite replicate the flavours of homemade pickles. “In Kerala’s plantation areas, most households still make their own fish and meat pickles,” Sheila says. In towns, where ready-to-eat food is more accessible, sales of her fish pickles are much higher.
In this context, small artisanal pickle brands like the ones run by Christina, Cynthia, and Sheila, rooted in family and community recipes, become their own form of preservation and documentation of this waning culinary practice. Rushina, who is currently working on a book on chutneys from across India, is hopeful that the modern offerings of cookbooks will bring some of these pickle recipes back as well. “We are seeing a new drive towards documentation that is looking at these older practices through a different lens. So, I suspect we will see cookbooks come up that do document these things,” she says.
Sohel Sarkar is a Bangalore-based independent journalist, writer and editor covering food, sustainability, gender and culture. Her work has appeared in Mongabay India. Feminist Food Journal, Whetstone Magazine, Sourced Journeys and Eaten Magazine, among others. You can find her on Instagram @sarkar.sohel10.
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