Ploughman's Pickle

There's a Saturday in November when the market starts looking like winter. The leafy things have gone, the tomatoes are a memory, and what's left is honest: swede, carrot, cauliflower, onions, the kind of vegetables that survive frost and don't ask for much. This is the pickle that uses all of them at once.

A ploughman's pickle isn't about any one ingredient. It's about what happens when you dice a great pile of winter vegetables small, throw them into a pan with vinegar and dark sugar and treacle and spices, and let the whole thing collapse slowly into something the colour of wet bark. The kitchen smells of cloves and malt and burnt sugar for two hours. By the time you're spooning it into jars, you'll have forgotten what your kitchen smelled like before.

Make it now and you'll be opening the first jar around Christmas, when the cheese board comes out and someone asks if there's any pickle. There will be. A great spoonful next to a wedge of mature cheddar, a hunk of bread, a pickled onion, a slice of ham. That's the whole point of this. You're not making pickle. You're making the future of every cold lunch you'll eat this winter.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first year I made it: "Roots. Treacle. Wait." That's still about right.