“I used to prepare the pickles with my father. He was born in Hungary and it was he who taught me how to cook. In fact, cooking was the only thing we did together that we both actually enjoyed. And my first memories of the food we made together were of freshly cut cucumbers pickling in vinegar.”
Fifteen years ago Nick turned the pickling skills he learnt in childhood into what has become a successful business: Vadasz pickles and ferments can be found in supermarkets and restaurants across the country and last year Nick published his first recipe book, The Pickle Jar. I know it’s a mouth-watering read because my daughter bought me a copy for Chanukah.
Nick Vadasz and his book[Missing Credit]
The know-how might have come from his father, now a retired GP, but the inspiration for Nick’s pickling empire comes from his paternal grandmother. In 1956, when the USSR invaded Hungary to crush the satellite Soviet state’s Hungarian Revolution, she fled the country with Nick’s father and… a jar of gherkins.
“She grabbed the important stuff, a few pieces of family silver, a bunch of photographs, a suitcase of clothes and a large jar of her homemade pickles. When I later asked why she’d chosen pickles above everything she could have taken, she said, ‘Well, we didn’t know when we were going to be able to eat again.’”
And pickles, of course, last for months. Today, we know that the vinegared and brined fruit and vegetables that sustained our forebears in the Jewish Pale of Settlement also aid digestion and boost the immune system. Put simply, if you want to improve your gut health in 2026, nosh more sauerkraut and gherkins. But back in the shtetl, before the age of home refrigeration, pickles and ferments were a way of surviving the harsh winters when fresh produce was in very short supply.
It was partly guilt at my childhood embarrassment over my mother’s pungent jars that led me to a pickling workshop on the outer reaches of Watford the other month. It was run by The Together Plan, a charity that preserves the Jewish heritage of Belarus, the landlocked country in eastern Europe that in 1939 was home to an estimated 1,175,000 Jews, nine in ten of whom were murdered in the Shoah. Today there are around 13,000 Jews living in Belarus and the organisation, set up by the most excellent Debra Brunner, supports them to stay Jewish. One way she does this is by, for a modest fee, teaching British Jews to preserve vegetables the way our forebears did. And in the case of my mother, still does.
We made what Debra calls Garlic Dilly Beans – but Debra’s workshop was also an education in the history and geography of Yiddishe lacto-fermentation. Also known as saltwater pickling, the brine encourages positive bacterial growth and stops the negative kind that causes food to spoil. And most pleasingly for the readers of this newspaper, you must only use kosher or sea salt. If the salt has any additives, it won’t work.
And most pleasingly for me, I now know the difference between saltwater pickling and vinegar pickling. Brine works with the bacteria found on fruit and vegetables to preserve them. Vinegar destroys the same bacteria – and in so doing, preserves the produce.
Now, I don’t want to sound too cocky, but pickling is not hugely difficult. If you’re sensible about measuring stuff, you can’t really go too wrong, not with a simple recipe such as that for Garlic Dilly Beans, anyway. Equipment-wise, all you need is a measuring jug, a couple of spoons, a knife and 1 litre jar with a seal. And all you need on the ingredients front are green beans, which you should trim, three cloves of garlic, a couple of sprigs of dill, some mustard seeds, the aforementioned kosher salt and a bay leaf or two.
Measure out 470 ml of water, add a level tablespoon and a level teaspoon of kosher salt, stir, pack in the beans tightly and then put in everything else. Then, slowly top up the jar with another 470 ml of water and stop when there’s an inch between the liquid and the top of the jar. Seal the jar and walk away.
After two days, you burp your jar. What? Yes, that’s right, you open the lid, leave it off for around 30 seconds and wait for your creation to belch, during which time bubbles might rise to the surface. Do this every day for the next five days. On day eight, try a bean and if you like the taste (I did, very much) stop the fermentation process by putting the jar in the fridge.
I went on a workshop, but James Cooper and Natalie Preston could also have taught me all this. They are the award-winning duo behind the pickles and ferments brand Shedletskys, named in honour of James’s great-grandfather Sam Shedletsky, who opened a butcher’s in east London in 1923.
Natalie Preston and James Cooper and their book[Missing Credit]
“I met Nat at a music festival a stone’s throw from Sam’s shop and early on in our relationship we’d regularly host dinner parties in our tiny Dalston flat, and it was at one of them that we first tried making kimchi,” he says. “We were hooked from the get-go. We loved that a few simple techniques and a bit of patience could produce something that is not only delicious but which stays good for months.”
Before long, they began hosting “pickling pop-ups”, inviting friends and later strangers into their flat to make pickles. Then, in 2019, they took the plunge and launched Shedletskys. They sell their wares in “nice delis” and farm shops and now they have brought out their first book Tickle Your Pickle with Shedletskys: How to make (& eat) homemade pickles, ferments and brines.
As well as a collection of recipes, the book explains how to pickle and ferment and has suggestions on what to eat with the fruits (and vegetables) of your labour. And best of all, James and Natalie have sprinkled it lightly with Jewish anecdotes including details of the couple’s first meal in Jerusalem, in 2022.
To be so openly Jewish at this antisemitic moment feels a pretty big deal. Todah, guys. I am going to buy a copy of your book for my mum, as a very belated apology.
www.thetogetherplan.com
