It started with pickles and escalated from there. Actually rewind back a decade and it really started with learning how to bake bread. About ten years ago I decided I wanted to learn crafts and skills that seemingly were on the decline and in jeopardy of being forgotten in our collective memory. I wouldn’t count bread making in this because bread making is still quite a popular activity amongst home cooks today but ten years ago the cult around bread making wasn’t as intense I don’t think.
But alongside breadmaking the two ancient textile crafts that I did learn were loom weaving and nålebinding. According to Wikipedia the earliest fragment of nålebinding dates back to 6500 BCE (“Nålebinding,” 2026). I made myself a beanie using nålebinding techniques. Just like the pottage from a few posts earlier Eating History: Medieval Pottage the beanie made using nålebinding looks like it’s from another time and place. It’s fascinating how reviving old or ancient practices, be it cooking or textile crafts, done in a modern age nonetheless produces items that bear the look and characteristics of a bygone era. To a degree, it really becomes a type of living history.
Crafts from ancient times: a beanie made using nålebinding. It's probably more of skull cap than a beanie. Photo credit: HammieRiffs.
After learning bread making, loom weaving and nålebinding modernity caught up with me again and I left the ancient world behind. Fast forward to 2026 and as I mentioned, it started with pickles. Years prior to 2026, I had abandoned a book about Japanese pickling techniques that I bought at my local bookshop. The pickles didn’t turn out well so I put the book on my bookshelf to gather dust and instead purchased pickles from the supermarket. I would be lying if I didn’t feel a little twinge of regret every time I ate shop pickles, remembering my repeated failed attempts to make a tasty home pickle.
During the past several years I have become quite fond of vlogs. I think my viewing habits dovetailed with a trend noticed within the social media landscape since the pandemic of viewers being drawn to more “authentic” social media content where curation and visual perfection is replaced by “real” life. People’s ordinary, everyday lives have become deeply engaging content for me. I am a voyeur and have always craned my neck to peek into warmly lit windows on evening walks, trying to catch glimpses of other people’s lives.
I became enamoured with a young woman’s YouTube channel which featured frequent visits to her mother’s Japanese kitchen where she showed her mum cooking and making things like rice bran pickles. I suddenly remembered somewhere on my bookshelf there was a book about Japanese pickling techniques. After unearthing it I made a cherry tomato, cucumber and carrot sweet pickle and it tasted delicious. Triumphant, I made this pickle over and over again until no one in my household could stomach it any longer and the pickling passion quietly dwindled away.
However, my success with pickling revived another old desire of mine: to learn how to make shio koji, which ferments foods and is used in traditional Japanese cuisine. Koji (麹) is made when rice has been inoculated with a mould called Aspergillus oryzae and shio koji is made using salt, water and the inoculated rice (Marx, 2025). It is basically an ancient fermentation process (“Kōji (food),” 2026). Koji can perhaps be dated back to as early as 300 BCE in China and it is first mentioned in Japanese cookbooks in 725 AD (“Kōji (food),” 2026).
The mould aspect of shio koji gave me pause for several weeks but eventually I mustered up enough courage and bought the necessary packet of inoculated rice from a Japanese grocery store. With much trepidation and doubt I attempted my first batch of shio koji and it was totally fine. I cooked my first meal using the shio koji by marinating some chicken breasts in shio koji and then baking the marinated chicken with butter and black pepper. It was delightful tasting and the shio koji did what was promised, it made the chicken breast tender and soft while adding a lovely depth of umami flavour.
It was a starting gun firing for an athletic race. The shio koji sent me down a rabbit hole of preservation and home cooking and now I operate a slow kitchen where time stretches and food takes many days before it becomes ready for consumption. The next thing I made was a lemon preserve using a modified version of Alton Brown’s recipe. I have always been curious about lemon preserves since first encountering them via British chef Jamie Oliver. Oliver’s “lov-a-ly jub-a-lee” way of speaking seared my brain to the point that it’s mostly what I remember about him when I try to recall his cooking shows. However, I do remember him introducing me to preserved lemon and how to use them. I also remember his pea and salmon risotto recipe. The lemon preserve takes 8 days before it’s ready.
After making the lemon preserves I was reading a manhwa (Korean manga) and it was about a cafe owner who made a very sour lemon preserve that no one liked to drink because it was too sour. She served this lemon preserve with sparkling water to make a type of lemonade or with hot water to make a hot lemon and sugar drink. I have seen a commercial variety of this Korean preserve being sold both in my local Chinese grocery shop and in the supermarkets but it has fructose which is quite off putting to me.
However, I really like lemonade on a hot day and hot lemon, sugar or honey drinks so the Korean Lemon Syrup drew me like a bee to honey. Seeing a home made version of this preserve in my Korean manga made me realise I could make this at home. I gathered the remaining lemons in my fridge leftover from the lemon preserve and made a batch of Korean Lemon Syrup. The Korean Lemon Syrup takes four days to two weeks before being ready if you use a fridge based method. It is ready when the sugar dissolves and the preserves take on a syrup-like quality. I don’t like sterilising my jars for canning so I tend to prefer fridge based methods of preserving and canning.
With summer approaching in the southern hemisphere, I began to cast around for more appetising cool drinks other than water. My solution was to buy a glass jug with a lid and start cold brewing ice teas. These take at least 24 hours before they are ready to drink. So now if I want a drink other than water, I have to see if either one of my two glass jugs of cold tea is ready. I cold brew green tea, barley tea and a variety of fruit tea bags.
With the onset of warm weather, fruits have become more varied and plentiful. I see punnets of berries piling up in my local supermarket. However, I have a blueberry bush on my balcony and because I have this plant I no longer buy fresh blueberries. The downside is if I want fresh blueberries to eat I have to wait for the berries on my blueberry bush to ripen as it is my only source of fresh blueberries. I wait for weeks between seeing the first green, hard fruits developing after flowering and when the blueberries are ripe enough to pick. I also have a fig tree and have to wait similar amounts of time before any figs are ready to eat or to be made into jam.
