Arnold Zwicky's Blog

… with a pun

In this bon appétit story by Carey Polis on 10/11/19 (which came to me in e-mail from ba today): “I Put This Condiment on Everything When I Can’t Be Bothered to Make a Sauce: Brooklyn Delhi’s tomato achaar is a little spicy, a lot of awesome”:

(#1) Brooklyn Delhi tomato achaar (photo by Laura Murray, pun on Delhi / deli by the food company)

This slightly spicy amalgam of tomatoes, garlic, salt, black mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, turmeric, asafetida, tamarind, sesame oil, and sugar is exactly what my salmon needs. Actually, not just my salmon but also green beans, eggs, chicken, rice, toast, and anything else I make that needs that little extra zhuzh. Think Italian tomato sauce meets harissa.

It sounds like a cop-out to say that it goes with everything, but I haven’t met a savory application that it doesn’t work with.

(Now on my To Try list. Ever since my South Asian days at the University of Illinois, I have been a fan of Indian pickles; the achaar high point of those years was a fabulous mango pickle from Andhra Pradesh, known in our household as “Subbarao’s mother’s mango pickle”, or “the wedding pickle” for short, since Karumuri V. Subbarao, then a UIUC grad student in linguistics (now a distinguished professor at the Univ. of Hyderabad) brought jars of it back with his new bride Sarala from their wedding, for UIUC friends who couldn’t manage to get to Telugu-land for the event.)

From Wikipedia:

South Asian pickles (or achar) are pickled foods, native to the Indian subcontinent, made from a variety of vegetables and fruits, preserved in brine, vinegar, or edible oils [typically, sesame oil in the south, mustard oil in the north] along with various Indian spices.

(#2) A Brooklyn Delhi 5-pack, from its website

The source is not entirely clear: Indian-style pickle is achaar in Hindi; Persian āchār refers to preserved meats, vegetables, or fruits.

Also available from Brooklyn Delhi, simmer sauces:

(#3) Three simmer sauces (I have some tikka masala simmer sauce, but it’s Patak’s rather than Brooklyn Delhi’s)

This entry was posted on October 21, 2019 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Language and food, Language play, My life, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.