Food Made Slowly: Pickled Ash Keys

I love food. Probably too much.

I also like trying new foods. Living in Los Angeles, I had access to just about every cuisine imaginable available to me within 5-10 miles. One of the most difficult things about moving from West Los Angeles to rural Fife was getting used to the fact that if I wanted halfway decent Mexican or Chinese food (or any other ethnicity that wasn't a part of the British empire), I needed to learn to cook it myself. When I left the Scottish countryside for the outskirts of metropolitan Cardiff, the greatest consolation was the availability of Continental, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, African/Caribbean, Indian, and Halal markets. When looking for housing, one of our biggest problems was finding a house with a kitchen big enough to accommodate our accumulation of herbs, spices, and sauces from different cuisines (not to mention my homemade pickles, preserves, brews, and infusions).

As much as I love eating a variety of world foods though, I recognize that living in the UK and eating a diet heavy in exotic produce isn't particularly sustainable. So, alongside my attempts to up my game in Thai, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Korean cooking, I'm also trying to learn about foraging for local wild foods, herbs and spices, and plant-based medicine.

In Los Angeles, I was never close enough to wild spaces to even think about foraging, but when our nearest neighbor was about a mile away, it was easy to look at all the green (and yellow, and red, and purple) growing things around me and wonder which of them might be useful. I still consider myself a very novice forager, but I'm learning to identify and use new plants all the time, most of them just by keeping my eyes open during my daily 1-mile walk to the train station. It's amazing the variety of useful and/or edible living things I've encountered just within the village: hawthorn, brambles, nettles, plantain, cow parsley, common hogweed, ground ivy, elder, red valerian, garlic mustard, herb Robert, and ivy-leaved toadflax. (To my great disappointment, I haven't yet found any local ground elder, sweet cicely, or wild garlic).

Ash keys in situ

I subscribe to a number of mailing lists and Facebook groups about identifying and using wild plants, and a while ago, I got an email containing a recipe for pickled ash keys. At the time, I didn't even know what an ash key was, let alone whether or not I'd like them pickled, but a couple of weeks ago, I noticed several clusters of the seed pods hanging from a row of ash trees about 50 yards from my front doorstep, so I looked up the recipe again. I still have no idea whether I'll like them, but I've been in a pickling mood recently, and for the cost of two cups of vinegar, a few spices, and an hour of my time, I figured they were worth a try.


Now, when I say that I looked up the recipe, what I actually mean is that I plugged "ash key pickle" into Google, looked at about a dozen different recipes, and once I had a pretty good idea what they were aiming for, I chucked the recipes out the window (figuratively speaking) and made something up as I went along. The end result was something like this:

I actually gathered about twice this
many seeds. This is the second batch,
after I removed the stems from the
first batch and realized that it was
only about half as much as
I needed!

• 2 cups (after removing the stems!) of very young, tender ash keys
• 2 cups of apple cider vinegar
• 3 heaping teaspoonfuls of brown sugar (Not the actual measuring spoon kind, but the kind you use to stir your tea)
• 6 whole cloves
• 8 black peppercorns
• 1/2 tsp ground Szechuan pepper (I couldn't find my whole peppercorns)
• 1 blade of mace
• 1 cinnamon stick
• A few slices of fresh ginger
• A few yellow mustard seeds

Some recipes call for malt vinegar rather than cider vinegar, others called for chili pepper or powder.

I rinsed the ash keys a few times to get rid of most of the bugs, and then boiled them three times, discarding the water after each time. This changes their color from a bright, vivid green to a dull olive and smells *exactly* like cooking artichokes. (And now I'm craving artichokes, which are sadly not particularly popular in British markets.)

Just for the record, I found it easier to use scissors to snip the stems off the ash keys before boiling, rather than pulling them off after. Plus, it makes it much easier to eyeball whether or not you have the full 2 cups of keys that you need. The first time around, I didn't remove the stems until after boiling, and found out that I needed to go out and pick another batch!

While the keys were cooking, I popped all of the other ingredients in my double boiler and set them to simmer for a good 20 minutes to let the spices infuse. I don't know why this step needs to be done in a double boiler but all of the recipes agreed that it shouldn't be done over direct heat. Once both the ash keys and the vinegar pickle were done and reasonably cool, I stuffed the keys into a jar and poured the pickling vinegar over them.

Pretty much all of the recipes say to wait at least 3 months before eating the pickles, so I'll update this post once I know how they taste!