Giardiniera

Giardiniera is an Italian mixed-vegetable pickle: cauliflower, carrot, celery, sweet pepper and pearl onions cut small, blanched in vinegar and packed in jars. The name comes from the garden: it is the preserve made at the end of summer from whatever the plot produced at once.

It carries no DOP or IGP, no legal definition and no fixed recipe. Its home ground is northern Italy, Lombardy and Piedmont above all, where the boiled-meat traditions demand something sharp on the side. The two big commercial names are Piedmontese: Ponti, founded at Ghemme in 1867, and Saclà, founded in Asti in 1939.

The American version diverged so far that it is effectively a separate food. In Chicago, giardiniera is packed in oil rather than vinegar, built on hot sport peppers and celery, and used as a condiment by the spoonful: mostly on Italian beef, sausage and pizza. Both are called giardiniera; only one of them will set your mouth on fire.

Italian giardiniera is sharp and clean, with the vinegar arriving first and a mild sweetness behind it. The vegetables stay crunchy, each one keeping its own flavour: cauliflower nutty, carrot sweet, celery grassy, pepper faintly bitter. Heat is absent, or a single chilli's worth. It refreshes the mouth rather than filling it.

Chicago giardiniera is a different sensation entirely: oily rather than watery, with a slow-building capsaicin heat, a heavy hit of celery and oregano, and a much softer texture. The vinegar is there but muted by the oil, so it coats instead of cutting.

Both are salty, both are meant to be eaten in small amounts against something rich, and neither is meant to be eaten cold from the fridge: let either come to room temperature and the flavours open up.

For Italian giardiniera, think side dish. Serve it at room temperature next to boiled or braised meat, on a salumi board, with hard cheeses, or in a mortadella sandwich. Small quantities: it is a counterweight, not a salad.

Chop it fine with parsley, an anchovy and olive oil and it becomes a fast sauce for poached meat, a shortcut cousin of salsa verde. The vinegar in the jar is worth keeping too: two spoons in a vinaigrette outperform straight vinegar.

For Chicago giardiniera, treat it as a condiment. Spoon it over an Italian beef sandwich, a sausage roll, a slice of pizza, scrambled eggs or a bowl of beans. The oil it sits in is flavoured: use it.

Neither type should be cooked. Heat collapses the vegetables and drives off the vinegar, leaving the dull half of the flavour behind.

Sealed pasteurised jars sit in a dark, cool cupboard for twelve to eighteen months, and the date printed on the lid is the reference, not the look of the glass. Jars sold from the chilled cabinet are usually unpasteurised: those stay in the fridge and carry a much shorter window, often around two months. Either way the pickle keeps changing inside the sealed jar. The vegetables go on drinking the brine, the crunch softens month by month, and the separate colours fade towards a common yellow.

Once open, the jar lives in the fridge and is generally given three to four weeks. Keep everything below the liquid line, because pieces that stand above it dry out and darken. Use a clean fork rather than fingers, and do not put back what has already been on a plate. If the level drops, top up with white wine vinegar rather than water, or with oil in the oil packed versions, tapping the jar to release trapped air. It does not freeze: thawed pickled vegetables go limp and lose the snap that is the whole point.

The first thing to sort out in an American shop is which giardiniera you are holding. Chicago style is finely chopped and packed in oil, built on sport peppers and celery, and it is made for an Italian beef sandwich. The Italian jar is a vinegar pickle of whole, nameable pieces: cauliflower florets, carrot batons, strips of red and yellow pepper, small onions, celery ribs. Both are good, neither replaces the other. In Britain the thing to keep separate is piccalilli, a mustard and turmeric sauce with vegetables suspended in it.

In the Italian jar the colours stay distinct: ivory cauliflower, bright carrot, clean red and yellow pepper. When it all drifts towards a uniform grey yellow, the vegetables were boiled hard or the jar has sat a long time. It should be audible to bite, and cauliflower that crumbles or carrot that bends means a long blanching. On the label, wine vinegar reads better than a generic vinegar, and in oil packed versions the oil sets the price: sunflower in most, extra virgin in the artisan jars, which can cost three times as much.

In the US, the hot Chicago style is everywhere: Marconi, Vienna Beef and Dell'Alpe are the classic Chicago labels, 6 to 10 dollars for a 16 oz jar in supermarkets and online. For the Italian vinegar-packed kind, look in the imported aisle or at an Italian deli for jars labelled sottaceti or giardiniera in aceto: roughly 7 to 12 dollars for a 500 g jar.

In the UK, Italian giardiniera is the default: Ocado, Waitrose and Italian delicatessens carry it at 3 to 5 pounds for a 280 g jar, and Ponti and Saclà are the two names you will see most. Chicago-style is a specialist import, usually 8 to 12 pounds a jar from American food shops.

In Italy, 2.50 to 5 euros for a supermarket jar, 6 to 9 for an artisan one packed in extra virgin olive oil.

Read the label for the packing medium: 'in oil' versus 'in vinegar' tells you more about how it will taste than the brand does.

Chicago, obviously, and specifically at an Italian beef counter: the sandwich is ordered wet or dipped, hot or sweet, and hot means giardiniera. Al's Beef, Johnnie's in Elmwood Park and Portillo's are the reference points, and every one of them will let you add more.

In Italy, the place to meet the original is a Piedmontese trattoria in bollito season, October to February, when the trolley arrives with boiled meats, green sauce, horseradish and a bowl of giardiniera. Asti, Alba and the Monferrato do this best; the Fiera del Bollito at Carrù, near Cuneo, is the annual event built around it.

In Lombardy it turns up on Valtellina salumi boards and next to cassoeula in winter, and Milan's older salumerie still sell it loose by weight from large glass jars.