As I was grating raw mangoes for making ‘mangai thokku” my thoughts took me back to the ”festival of pickling’ in my maternal home. Wondering what this new festival is??….come summer my mother would get busy with the preparation for pickling and having stayed in the City of Hyderabad the pickling season would always begin with mangoes. The festivity would begin with the entire family trouping into our car and heading to the spice shop a specialty on exclusive for pickling spices and the oil ghani. My mother would discuss the quality of spices, the quantity to be bought and the escalation in price in both oil and spices when compared to the previous years … all with my father who would give her a patient hearing probably calculating the expense for pickling . We, the three sisters would be silent spectators to this with our mind voices questioning …does a mere pickle require so much of family time?
Next would be the trip to the ‘mandi” with buckets of water loaded in the boot of the car and huge, clean bed sheets specially set aside for this purpose. Mangoes would be bought .Different varieties for different types of pickles. All would be washed in the buckets of water that we had carried and wiped and cut into different sizes. The totapuri alone would come home without the expert cut because this would be grated to make mangai thokku and chunda. Avakakai,bellam avakai,avakai with channa, manga thokku, chundo….phew the 2 day festival would come to an end.
After mixing the mangoes with the spice powders and oil , all would be appropriately bottled and set aside for the year and also some for distribution amongst friends and relatives. Now comes the most interesting and much awaited part of the pickle festival….. My mother would make hot steaming rice, which would be ladled into the pickle mixing vessel, a huge brass “jorthavalai ‘. The rice would be mixed in that vessel with some sesame oil and the rice would absorb all the remnant spices, oil and the mango flavor from the pickling vessel. This hot spicy rice would be made into huge balls and served on our plates with fried appalams .All of us would eagerly await this moment, and quickly take small portions of the hot spicy rice and mix it with the crushed appalam and begin to eat .No words can describe that wonderful feel or that delicious taste which still lingers in my mind.
Even today I do follow the same ritual but some where there is a missing link that is totally unfathomable.
