TIFFIN 

The Achaar Queen THE COOKBOOK WRITER AND PICKLE MAVEN ON FRESH, SEASONAL INDIAN FOOD Story and Photograph: Rohan Kamicheril hitra Agrawal is on a mission to get achaar into American kitchens. Her Indian pickles, which she gives their Hindi name, and sells under her Brooklyn Delhi label, grew out of her penchant for preserving CSA windfalls using her family’s traditional recipes. Her products (which have won acclaim from places like Food and Wine and the New York Times) includ

Indian pickles are a wildly different beast from their Western counterparts. They’re fiery concoctions made out of a variety of vegetables, fruit, or sometimes even fish and meat. Take your average kosher dill pickle, add about 25 different spices to it, a quart of oil, and let it ferment in the sun for a week and you might just end up with something approaching an Indian pickle. It’s a good thing, I promise. As weird and obscure as they seem, Indian pickles do have something