Pickling Season: Start Them Now, Open Them at Christmas

Pickling onions is one of the last jobs in the food year that you genuinely cannot hurry. Whatever you pack this week won't be ready until the end of October, and won't be at its best until Christmas. That's rather the point of it.

The English pickling onions have landed, which means the window is open. We've got them loose by the pound if you want a jar or two for the shelf, or in 5kg nets if you're doing the proper Christmas batch. Alongside them: Ede's pickling liquor in all three varieties, pickling spice, and chillies running from the perfectly civilised to the frankly unreasonable.

A Plymouth name since 1880

If you grew up anywhere between Tavistock and the Tamar, you'll know the bottle before you know the name. Ede's was made at the vinegar works on Cremyll Street in Stonehouse, and for generations in this corner of Devon and Cornwall it was simply what you pickled with. Not a choice so much as an assumption.

The label still carries the words Established 1880, and it has earned them. The works itself is quiet these days, but the name and the recipe carried on, and the bottle on our shelf is the same one people round here have been buying for well over a century. If your mother or your nan made pickled onions, there's a fair chance this is what was in the jar.

One thing worth saying plainly, because the label says it and we'd rather you heard it from us: Ede's is a non-brewed condiment rather than a brewed vinegar. Water, acetic acid, salt, a little caramel for colour. That isn't a shortcoming and it isn't a modern shortcut — it's what the West Country has pickled with for generations, and it's precisely why onions made with it taste the way people remember them tasting.

Clear, dark, or ready spiced?

Three bottles, and the choice is simpler than it looks.

• Dark — the traditional one. Onions come out that deep amber-brown everybody expects from a proper pickled onion.
• Clear — the same liquor without the caramel colouring. It stains nothing, so beetroot keeps its colour, cauliflower stays white and pickled eggs stay pale. Worth having if you're doing more than onions.
• Ready spiced — the spices are already in. One bottle, nothing else to buy, nothing to measure.

Spicing it yourself gives you control over the blend and a sharper, more old-fashioned result. Ready spiced saves you a job. Neither is the right answer; it depends whether you enjoy that part.

How much will you actually need?

This is the question we get asked across the counter more than any other, so here are the numbers.

A 5kg net

• Around 2.5 to 3 litres of pickling liquor
• 250g of salt for the overnight salting
• Fills roughly fifteen 1lb jars, or seven litre Kilners

A 2.5 litre bottle just about covers a net if you pack your jars tightly — with nothing spare. If you're spicing your own, or topping the jars up after a week when the onions settle, buy two. Far better than running dry at the sink on a Sunday afternoon.

A pound of onions

About 270ml of liquor and a rounded tablespoon of salt. Enough for a jar to put on the shelf and forget about.

How hot do you like them?

This is where a batch stops being a batch and starts being yours. We keep chillies right along the scale, and a split chilli tucked into the jar does something a spoonful of spice can't.

Left to right, that's Dutch chillies and jalapeños at the gentle end, Thai chillies in the middle, then habaneros and Scotch bonnets for people who have something to prove.

The graphic won't tell you how many to use, so we will:

• Dutch or jalapeño — one or two per jar, split lengthways. Warmth rather than heat.
• Thai — one per jar, left whole. Two if you mean it.
• Habanero or Scotch bonnet — half a chilli per jar, and wash your hands before you go anywhere near your face. Three months is a long time for a chilli to steep. One whole one will take over every onion in the jar.

Peppercorns are a different job. Black and white for flavour; pink and green mostly for how handsome they look suspended in the liquor — which matters more than you'd think if the jar is going to be a present.

The four things that go wrong

Almost every disappointing jar of pickled onions fails for one of these reasons, and all four are easily avoided.

That last one is the whole business, really. Six weeks is the minimum. Three months and they're right — which, if you're counting, puts a jar started this weekend exactly where it needs to be on Christmas Eve.

Fifteen jars, and only so many of you

Here's the thing nobody plans for. A single net makes about fifteen jars, and unless you're feeding an army, you're not getting through fifteen jars of pickled onions yourself.

So you'll have a dozen spare whether you intended to or not — and a jar of onions someone made themselves, labelled and tied with a bit of string, is a far better present than most things that cost three times as much. The catch is timing: a gift jar needs to be ready by the day rather than on it, so if presents are the plan, don't leave it until November.

Pick your jars with that in mind. Something worth giving, filled with onions and a red chilli and a few pink peppercorns, looks like it came from a shop. It just came from your kitchen instead.

Come and get set up

Everything here is on the shelves at 12 West Street and on the website. If you're not sure how much of what you need, come in and ask — we'd rather spend five minutes getting it right than have you back on Saturday needing another bottle.

And put the date in your diary now: the last sensible weekend for Christmas onions is the middle of November. After that you're making Easter onions, which is a perfectly good thing to make, just not the one you were planning.