I get green tomato pickles on my mind every time I walk past the tomatoes on the vine in my backyard these chilly days. I've been reading about pickles, too. One of the best books I've found is Linda Ziedrich's The Joy of Pickling. It's not only thorough, it's also very well written (I was hopeful from the beginning when I saw that the book opens with an epigraph from an excellent Salman Rushdie novel). I liked also that she immediately simplifies the subject by saying there are basically two kinds of pickles, fermented pickles and vinegar pickles. Fermented or natural pickles use a brine to encourage good bacteria to create the acidity. Vinegar pickles can work faster and tend to have more of a sweet-sour profile, whereas the fermented pickles don't rely on ...
