My family has this closely guarded secret passed down through the generations. That’s some intense ‘Chinese Whispers’, isn’t it?
I’ve grown up hearing stories of the secret’s ancestry; how some generations passed it through oral instructions, while other more fortunate ones had scribbling in the margins of yellowing recipe books to bank on. Considering its long winding route to the present, I’ve often wondered if its originality has sustained.
The answer to my scepticism lies in many Sunday lunches at home, which feature plump fried mackerels stuffed with the ‘trade-secret’ recheado masala (a tangy Goan paste made with chillies, vinegar and spices). Every time, I’m amazed at how the secret has remained unaltered; if at all, it has only seasoned with time.
Masalas in Indian homes are a cultural lifeline. Whilst most curries borrow from common cooking principles, each is set apart by a nuanced difference, rendered by the masalas. Like potion bottles in an apothecary, the labelled jars stack up, promising a culinary alchemy the minute you twist off the lid.
It is fascinating though, in a world dominated by dry powdered forms, how their moist counterparts rose to fame. For this, we have an Indian woman and her afternoon experiments to thank.
When the British stumbled upon their favourite pickles
For Brian Fernandes (47), his memories of masalas are mainly allegorical. It brings to mind his grandmother Nataline Fernandes who, he says, had the ingenious idea, one day, of adding water and vinegar to a dry powdered masala to turn it into a paste that could be bottled.
“It was her way of preserving the dry masalas,” Brian explains, to date marvelling at the futuristic kitchen hacks his grandmother had in the early 20th century. “She was the one who pioneered the concept of the wet masala paste,” he adds.
Currently at the helm of affairs at Ferns’ Pickles — a corollary of Nataline’s culinary experiments — Brian speaks about how the brand’s range of products is an ode to his nana’s (grandmother) knack for coaxing flavour out of the humblest of ingredients. He then delves into the story of how she did it.
In 1927, Nataline moved to Pune with her pharmacist husband Benjamin, who set up a store in the family home in Khadki (then Kirkee). Business was slow, and in 1937, a decade after its inception, Benjamin decided to shut it.
Intent on helping the family rally through this sticky phase, Nataline stepped in. A bona fide gourmand, she had enjoyed making pickles, jams, and preserves for her family and decided to expand her audience. Well-known in the area — “My grandmother used to play the piano in church” — Nataline decided to scale her production output. It wasn’t long before they found favour with the local British soldiers and their families.
Elaborating on this new clientele, Brian says, “Kirkee was a cantonment area where the ammunition factory was located. My grandparents were surrounded by a lot of British families.” Once word got out that Aunty Nataline’s magic was now up for sale, she was inundated with orders for her brinjal pickle and mango jelly.
“My grandmother never started out intending to build a business. She was an extremely good cook and it’s people who told her to start selling what she prepared. She wondered aloud who would buy her preserves but the neighbours would say, ‘You make it. We will buy it.’.”
This is how Ferns’ Pickles was born — a small home venture whose pickles, jams, jelly, and squashes delighted the people of Pune. Soon, Nataline’s preserves transcended the Pune borders and were selling across cities, becoming a transnational craze.
Ferns’ Pickles: A flavour of nostalgia
Right since its infancy, the brand has prided itself on the freshness of its ingredients. “My grandmother’s recipes had no artificial ingredients, not even for preservation. This is what sets our pickles apart from market varieties. Ours are cooked.” Likewise with the curry pastes. This cooking process gives the pastes a shelf life of two years.
Letting us in on their no-preservative secret, Brian says, “The preserves are bottled at 85 degrees Celsius. This creates a vacuum and preserves the product.” The only preservative aside from salt is vinegar. In addition to this, the curry pastes, he says, are free from nuts, gluten, dairy, sugar and chemicals.
Today, almost 87 years after its inception, Ferns’ Pickles stays true to its moral compass of business, procuring its vegetables and fruits from farms around the factory in Pune. The preserves are prepared within 24 hours of harvest.
Brian accompanies the virtual tour of the factory with the story of how the business reins passed on to him.
At just 17 years of age, he was entrusted with the legacy of Ferns’ Pickles following the demise of his father George who was charge d’affaires after Nataline passed away in 1966. He spent the next several years ensuring he did justice to his role. The fully automated factory with BRC (British Retail Consortium) certification — an international mark of excellence — is proof.
However, he assures, “The factory is fully automated but the recipes we follow are traditional. They are all my grandmother’s originals.” Drawing on the point of the brand’s consistency, their loyalists span the globe. “If you go to any Chinese restaurant in the UK and have the noodles, it is guaranteed to be made of Ferns’ curry paste. We even supply to the Japanese restaurant chain in the UK, Wagamama.”
While today, Ferns’ pickles and curry pastes are exported to Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand, it isn’t the first time the brand is getting global love. Again, Nataline was way ahead of the curve when it came to marketing.
In 1947, when the last of the British were leaving the country, disappointed that they would have to forego their delicious pickles and jams, Nataline managed to find a Mumbai-based merchant exporter who agreed to carry her pickles to the UK in 1949 — thus laying the carpet for export opportunities.
Building a business as a woman in the 1920s, required a certain level of intrepidity. And Nataline left no stone unturned. Brian shares, “My grandmother used to work really hard. In those days, Pune was mostly jungle land. So, she would cycle to the market at 4.30 am to buy the ingredients she needed and put it on a bullock cart, which would then bring it back to the factory to be cooked and processed.”
She would meticulously record her recipes in a book, a sort of archive of food memories, which the family still holds on to.
Carrying on an alimentary legacy
Ferns’ Pickles has seen three generations of expertise. And Brian sees this as a testament to the brand’s legacy. The secret, he says, lies in continuously pushing the envelope, a trait he picked up from his father George.
“When my grandmother wasn’t well in 1960, my father, who was in the merchant navy at the time, quit and took over the business. In the 70s, pickle bottles would be wrapped in straw and put into wooden boxes and exported. But the journey through the sea would cause the bottles to break. My father was one of the first to start using cardboard boxes for packaging. This sorted the issue of breakage.”
While George enhanced most of the logistical frameworks of the brand, Brian has added his pickle renditions to the existing menu.
Letting us in on one recipe that he considers his best work, Brian says it is the garlic pickle. “We had a demand for garlic pickles in the UK. My grandmother did not have a recipe for garlic pickle, nor did my father, and I didn’t know what to do. This was about 24 years ago now. So I went through the recipe book to come up with something but discovered that all the other garlic pickles in the market were spicy. I wanted a version that would be pleasant to eat.”
Intent to come up with a rendition, Brian spent three months curating, trying, and failing, before finally arriving on a pickle that is now one of their bestsellers.
Another cool invention, he says, was the butter chicken paste. “When my grandmother was alive, there was no concept of butter chicken. When my father was running the business, it had not really caught on. But by the time I took over the business in the 90s, butter chicken was becoming a big thing,” he shares.
Constant invention has been the key to continuing the legacy. And that is also the reason Nataline’s pickles have amassed love across the globe.
Fun fact: The Braganza pickle factory and the character of its owner Mary Pereira in Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children was inspired by her.
As Rushdie recounted in an interview with Contemporary Authors in 1982, “…in Bombay, when I was a child, there was a very good pickle factory called Ferns’ Pickles. And on all the labels of the Ferns’ Pickles, you would see a little rubric along the bottom, which said, ‘Made from the original recipes of Mrs N Fernandes.’ And Mrs Fernandes became a kind of myth figure to me. I imagined this little old lady sitting in a corner making these wonderful pickles and sending recipes to the factory, and getting rich and famous.”
While the world knows her as Mrs Fernandes who made the delicious pickles, for Brian she will always be the grandmother who managed to bring metaphors of food and flavour into everything she created.
Edited by Pranita Bhat; Pictures source: Brian Fernandes
