Recipes
Recipes, in the words of the people who recorded them
There are 23 of them, carrying 124 steps between them, and this site wrote none of those steps. Each one is a sentence lifted whole from the FAO bulletin or the USDA home preservation guides, checked character for character against the page it came from each time this table is rebuilt from the sources. The labels above the sentences are ours. The sentences are theirs.
Start here if you have not done this before
The two USDA recipes - sauerkraut and fermented dill pickles - are the only two here written as recipes, by a body whose job is to say what is safe to eat at home. They give household quantities, a temperature band, and a stated consequence at each end of that band. Everything else below is a record of how a food is made somewhere in the world, which is a different kind of document.
| Recipe | Substrate | Where | Quantities | Steps | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sauerkraut, USDA home method | Cabbage | United States | ratio, as written | 10 | USDA/NCHFP Sauerkraut |
| Dry-salted lime pickle | Lime | India, Pakistan and North Africa | ratio, as written | 8 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.1 |
| Dry-salted cucumber pickle | Cucumber | Africa, Asia and Latin America | ratio, as written | 7 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.2 |
| Sauerkraut | Cabbage | Europe and North America | scaled here | 6 | FAO Bulletin 134 5.6.2 |
| Dry-salted vegetables, the general method | any | General | ratio, as written | 7 | FAO Bulletin 134 5.6.1 |
| Hum choy | Leafy vegetables | Southern China | none stated | 4 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.3 |
| Pak-gard-dong | Mustard leaf | Thailand | none stated | 3 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.3 |
| Tempoyak | Durian | Malaysia | none stated | 2 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.1.4 |
| Recipe | Substrate | Where | Quantities | Steps | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fermented dill pickles, USDA home method | Cucumber | United States | ratio, as written | 9 | USDA/NCHFP Dill Pickles |
| Green mango pickle | Mango | India, Pakistan and Bangladesh | scaled here | 6 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.1 |
| Lime pickle, brined | Lime | India, Pakistan and North Africa | none stated | 8 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.2 |
| Black olives | Olive | Mediterranean | scaled here | 5 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.5 |
| Brined vegetables, the general method | any | General | scaled here | 4 | FAO Bulletin 134 5.6.3 |
| Green olives, Spanish style | Olive | Mediterranean | scaled here | 6 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.4 |
| Kanji | Carrot | Northern India and Pakistan | ratio, as written | 5 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.3.5 |
| Kimchi | Chinese cabbage | Korea | scaled here | 5 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.3 |
| Brined cucumber pickles | Cucumber | General | scaled here | 4 | FAO Bulletin 134 5.6.3 |
| Jackfruit pickle | Jackfruit | India and Sri Lanka | scaled here | 6 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.6 |
| Pak-sian-dong | Pak sian leaf | Thailand | none stated | 2 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.2.9 |
| Recipe | Substrate | Where | Quantities | Steps | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kocho | Enset | Ethiopia | none stated | 7 | FAO Bulletin 134 6.3.2 |
Why many of these have no quantities
8 of the 23 recipes carry a salt percentage this site can scale to a batch size, and those pages do the arithmetic and print the working. 6 more state a ratio in their own prose, which is shown as it was written rather than converted, because the sentence carrying the figure usually carries a condition with it.
2 state that the salt is none, which is a figure and not a gap: gundruk and sunki ferment without any. The remaining 7 have no stated quantity at all, and those pages say so rather than showing a number that would look just as authoritative and would have come from nowhere.
What a recipe here is
The FAO bulletin is a global survey written in 1998, not a cookbook. It describes production at village and factory scale, in the passive voice, and several of its entries run to four sentences. Where that is all the record says, the page here is four steps long and does not pad itself out to look like the recipes you are used to.
The trade is deliberate. A short page that is true is worth more than a full one where two thirds came from a general idea of how pickling works. What each page adds to its source is order, arithmetic, and the numbers from the parameter table set beside the method they belong to. Before you start, read the safety page: two of these use a caustic solution, and this site does not certify that any preparation on it is safe.