Another UK/US/India nomenclature problem: chutney here is pickled veg preserved in sugar and vinegar.
I don’t think it spent 9 months getting to you. I think it spent 8 months on your neighborhood store’s shelves.
It might include fruit, might it not, in UK parlance?
Apple and onion chutney, for example.
Which makes U.K. chutney a third species of condiment, because it’s not the same thing as achar, and the statement that the Indian kind of pickles are basically chutney is still wrong.
So what kind of pickles is the OP talking about?
American-style brine or vinegar-pickled cucumbers?
British-style vinegar-pickled onions (or other vegetables)?
Achar (Indian-style oil-pickled vegetables)?
U.K. chutney (sugar-and-vinegar pickled vegetables)?
Actuallty, ascenray, you’re not entirely correct: the very Indian mango chutney is indeed a preserve, and is very like the British variety (which does indeed sometimes contain fruit).
Anyway, I think the OP is referring to American-style pickles in vinegar.
Mango chutney as part of traditional Indian cuisine is meant to be eaten fresh. Of course, any food that is canned or jarred for commercial sale is going to have some preservatory characteristics – that’s the whole point of canning or jarring.
The point remains that “Indian pickle” is achar and chutney is not achar; therefore, the claim that “Indian pickle is basically chutney” is wrong. It’s like saying “French pickle is basically mayonnaise.”
Yes, fair enough.
What kind of pickles are they? Logically, they are the grocery store’s brand of “Polish Crunchy Dill”, of course. They are 4 inch cucumbers in a spicy vinegar liquid that allegedly is from a recipe of Polish origin. They are very good when chilled- as good as that incredibly expensive $2.29 Stork kind.
I can’t even believe that it does not cost more than $1.59 per unit to get the two or three cargo containers full of pickles off the damn boat in Houston (or Los Angeles), onto a trailer or train, then unload them at the distribution center, then get them into trucks again, then take them to the local store and get them placed on the shelves. I am not even talking about the production of the actual product or the shipping from India. Someone, somewhere is getting screwed big time.
I am not sure about that. This is a humongus high volume store. If you go shopping at 12:00am, a lot of the shelves are more than half empty. Then an army of guys come out with these forklift things, pretend that you are not there, then start slinging stuff around like they only have 3 minutes to stock the whole store. Those pickles had to be either in transit or being stored somewhere for most of those months. Ten jars of Indian made Polish Crunchy Dills do not last long in my neighborhood, defintely not 8 or nine months.
Since this thread appeared I can’t stop singing to myself “Every time it rains, it rains pickles from India”.
Carry on.
Apparently there are some Picklefolk who disagree.
Near a week-long music festival we attended this summer in Michigan, we repeatedly passed a homemade sign stuck out on a farm driveway amongst the fields of dill:
PICKLE
4
SALE
I wonder what else they had in their inventory…