Meet India’s ‘Pickle Queen’

Most self-published books are vanity projects and their print runs and sales are usually miniscule. Sometimes, however, one will break the mold and become a cult classic or even, in rare cases, a bestseller. That is part of the story behind Usha’s Pickle Digest: The Perfect Pickle Recipe Book by Usha R. Prabakaran – but the self-publishing success is only a sliver of Mrs. Prabakaran’s fascinating tale.

Prabakaran, now 64, published the book herself in 1998 after publishers turned her down. Shortly after she printed her first run of 1,000 books, Prabakaran learned that she had a brain tumor that required surgery and a lengthy recovery. The book was all but forgotten, although not to avid home cooks in India, who scrambled to find the rare tome and who made bootleg copies if they couldn’t find it.

Although Prabakaran has now developed a reputation as India’s ‘pickling queen’, she never sought fame or fortune from publishing her carefully researched volume, which is now available on Amazon. “The reason for writing the book was to ensure that the vast culinary heritage of this land stays on the map,” she told The New York Times. She was concerned that this knowledge was in danger of being lost if she did not document the amazing variety of pickles from all regions of India. The vast number of recipes – Prabakaran limited herself to 1,000 of the 5,000 recipes she collected – shows that nothing escapes pickling in India. There are recipes for standard items like plums and cherries, but also for unusual fruits, vegetables, seeds and all manner of plants such as sprouted fenugreek seeds, hibiscus flowers and green walnuts.

Prabakaran is gearing up to self-publish her second cookbook, called “Usha’s Rasam Digest,” this spring. She has been working on this book for over ten years, following the same path of researching, gathering, and testing thousands of recipes. The book will feature 1,000 ways to make rasam, an everyday soup also called saaru.