A few years back, Elvina passed away. I talked about how much sharing pickles with her had meant to me at her funeral. Her daughter-in-law and her son remembered what I said when it came time for them to move from the house they had shared with Elvina, and told me to take as many jars of Elvina’s pickles from their cellar as I could carry. I took over 75 jars of pickles—and I’ve just run out.
So. This month, we’re going to talk about how to make vinegar-less, flavorful, spicy salt pickles just like Elvina used to make!
Pickling Brine Ingredients:
2 tablespoons kosher salt for every quart of water
Pickling Spice Ingredients:
2 tablespoons black peppercorns
2 tablespoons mustard seeds
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 tablespoons dill seed
1 tablespoon allspice berries
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
10-12 bay leaves, crumbled
Ingredients for Each Quart Jar of Pickles:
Pickling cucumbers, scrubbed
1 quart pickling brine
1 tablespoon pickling spice
4-5 peeled and gently crushed cloves of garlic
2-4 Thai chilies, split down the middle with the seeds left intact
2-3 fronds of dill weed (fresh or dried)
2-3 grape leaves
Before we begin pickling, there are some things we should go over. If you’re not sure if you have the equipment for canning, check it out here. If you’re new to canning and are worried about messing it up, here’s the rundown.
Now you’ve got all that, let’s talk cucumbers. 1½ to 2 pounds fresh is equal to 1 quart canned pickles, assuming your pickles have an average length of about 4 inches. A bushel of pickling cucumbers is 48 pounds of cucumbers, and comes out to 16-24 quarts of pickles, depending on how closely they’re packed. If this is your first time making the pickles and you don’t want too many or too few, a half bushel or 24 pounds of pickling cucumbers should get you about 10-12 jars of pickles.
Now that you’ve got your equipment and decided on how many jars of pickles you’re going to make, it’s time to make our brine and scrub our pickling cucumbers. This is also a good time to sterilize your quart jars.
Make the brine by dissolving your salt in the amount of water you’ll need. Remember you’ll need two tablespoons of salt for every quart of water you need, and one quart of brine for each jar—which means you should have a quart of water for every quart of pickles you intend to make. You can heat the water to help the salt dissolve, but it shouldn’t be necessary to boil it for a long period. Be careful of boiling off your water if you choose to heat your brine.
If you’ve never scrubbed a cucumber before, you might find the experience quite cumbersome. The important part is to make sure that all of the bristles have been removed from the skin of the cucumber. It’s important to get rid of the blossom at the end of the cucumber, and if you want your cucumbers to be particularly crunchy with no softness, make sure to trim off at least 1/16 inch of the blossom end. If you’re confused about which end is the blossom end, it’s the one that DOESN’T have the stem. If you aren’t sure which end that is, cut them both off. Trimming will allow the brine to infiltrate the cucumber more quickly as well, so even though you might feel like you’re losing valuable pickle real estate, you’ll be ensuring that the enzymes released by the blossom end don’t soften your cucumber and that the pickle will have a delicious, consistent flavor.
If you haven’t made your pickling spice yet, throw your ingredients into a bowl and mix. You can pass on the red pepper flakes if you’re going to use more Thai chilies, or keep them if you want extra heat.
Once you’ve made your brine and pickling spice, and scrubbed and trimmed your cucumbers, you’re ready to assemble your jars! First, lay a grape leaf at the bottom of your sterile quart jar. Throw a half tablespoon of your pickling spice into the bottom of the jar, along with two to three of your garlic cloves. One of your chilies can go down here as well. Then start packing your cucumbers into the jar. It will be easiest if you put the largest cucumbers in first, as smaller cucumbers can fit between them more easily. Be careful not to break or bruise your cucumbers during this process. Let one of your other Thai chilies get lost somewhere in the middle of this packing process, and be sure to leave yourself space at the top of the jar. Once the pickles are packed, throw the other half tablespoon of pickling spice and the rest of your Thai chilies and garlic in. Fill the jar with brine, and ball up your final grape leaf to keep the cucumbers submerged in the brine. If one grape leaf isn’t enough to keep the pickles submerged, use another. Sometimes there would be two or three grape leaves at the top of Elvina’s jars, so don’t be wary about using too many.
If you’re allergic to grape leaves or don’t like them for some reason, though, you can use other leaves so long as they have tannins in them. Here’s a list of good ones and an explanation about why they work as part of the pickling process.
Once all of that is in your jar, wipe the rim, apply your sterilized seals, and tighten the canning rings. There seem to be a lot of different opinions about how tightly you should tighten these rings, so I’m going to suggest heading somewhere in the middle. Elvina’s jar rings were usually rusty and difficult to open, but I don’t think that’s because she used her old lady super strength to tighten them to the extreme. One blog suggests tightening only as much as you can with your fingertips and no more. That seems like a good rule to me.
Once done, store somewhere between 60 and 85 degrees. If you notice the lids of your jars bulging, burp your jars by unscrewing the ring a little, then retightening. Everyone has different opinions about when pickles are done fermenting and ready for consumption or cold storage, but here’s a nifty guide about how you can monitor your pickles. It seems at least six weeks will be necessary with salt pickles, but if you notice bubbling in your brine and a sour yet pleasing smell from the jars, you’re probably in the clear.
It’s not just pickles that can benefit from their own company, though. Self reflection is something human beings benefit a lot from as well, especially when recovering from trauma. It’s not often that characters are given the opportunity to recover from trauma in narrative, though. Either the plot works its magic and they’re magically recovered or a character is deemed too damaged and they either sacrifice themselves or are killed off in the events that follow. That’s why it was so exciting to have every character of the main cast of the Persona 5 video game realistically work through and recover from their trauma.
I had high hopes for Persona 5 when it was announced. I dreamed of a female protagonist option, same-sex romance storylines, and more realistic and character-true writing for the heterosexual romances. While Persona 5 didn’t give me these things, it did give me a gritty story riddled with abuse and realistic recovery—even if the methods that put an end to the abuse were the stuff of fantasy.
Persona 5 centers around Akira Kurusu. As a minor wrongfully convicted of an assault charge, he is placed on probation and sent away to a new school. There he meets Ryuji Sakamoto, a previous member of the track team who quit running when his coach broke his leg, and Ann Takamaki, a girl who is going on dates with said coach to protect her best friend’s starting position on the school volleyball team. All of them have been wronged, all of them are in trouble, but none of them know what to do or how to resist. Then, a mysterious app on Akira’s phone transports Akira and Ryuji to a distorted version of the troublesome coach’s reality called the Metaverse where their coach’s Shadow rules over a Palace like a king. Ryuji and Akira encounter a cat-like entity named Morgana within the Palace. When Morgana tells Akira and Ryuji they can force the coach to confess his crimes by stealing the treasure of the Palace, the team finds a way to resist.
In the average storyline, Ann and Ryuji’s traumas would be fixed as soon as their abuser was out of the picture. Persona 5’s true strength comes through when both Ann and Ryuji are still dealing with the effects of their coach’s behavior even after he’s confessed to his crimes and been imprisoned.
Some other members of the cast, like Yusuke Kitagawa and Makoto Niijima, refuse to acknowledge they’re being abused at all when Akira and company bring it to their attention, until they reach their own personal breaking points. Yusuke resists after the Shadow of his abuser owns up to the crimes Akira and company suspect him of. Makoto takes longer, as several people in her life are taking advantage of her. It’s not until her conflict with each comes to a head that she stops doing what she’s told, stops enduring the abuse, and resists.
The cast also includes characters that know they’re being abused, but put up with it for the love of their abuser, like Haru Okumura, who hopes once her father is brought to his senses by the Phantom Thieves he’ll return to being the caring parent and compassionate business owner she remembers from her younger days.
But the real coup de grâce is the party member that is punishing herself, Futaba Sakura. Futaba is the only party member who has her own Palace. Akira’s team—fittingly called the Phantom Thieves given the nature of the work they do in Palaces—infiltrates Futaba’s Palace to help her work through her troubled past and distorted memories concerning the death of her mother.
Futaba is a person who rarely ever leaves her room and absolutely never leaves her house. The Japanese term for a person like Futaba is a “shut in,” and they are hugely stigmatized in Japanese culture. The inclusion of Futaba in the game and the attention paid to her as a party member who gets to recover from her shut in status is something that’s rare in Japanese media. The portrayal of Futaba not as a victim but rather an active participant in her own recovery is even more colossal.
As you can see in the video, Futaba faces herself before her Persona awakens. Each Persona user is forced to do that, but since Futaba also plays the part of her own abuser, she is also rebelling against herself and the tomb of guilt she built to keep herself prisoner. Any kind of change requires self reflection. Any kind of healing from trauma like this requires even more so. Most of the struggles portrayed in Persona 5 are fantastical when it comes to how the party member rebels against their abuser. Futaba’s is much more metaphorical. While the method is still fantastical, the core of the situation is realistic: Futaba faces herself, overcomes the limitations she’s inflicted on herself, and changes her world view. Her recovery comes about not because the Phantom Thieves stole her heart, or because the monster she created in her distorted reality was beaten, but because she looked at herself and said “no more.”
Of course, that was just the beginning of Futaba’s recovery. Each recovery begins with the step of deciding one wants to recover—and it’s pickling with our thoughts that helps us get there. Of course, fermentation can be a tricky business. Left to our own devices, we are capable of becoming delicious pickles, or sour, rotten versions of ourselves carrying botulism. That’s why we go about it like they do in Persona 5; with a couple good friends who know what we’re going through and who don’t let us forget our good parts, one of whom might be the main character and our personal, unpaid therapist.
Happy pickling, you all!
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