Spanish caperberries brined whole on the stalk, the saucer that comes with the vermouth
Origin: Ballobar & Murcia, Spain
From the journey of Caper.
The rest of Europe eats the caper bud and mostly ignores the fruit. Spain does both, and the fruit has a life of its own there that it has nowhere else. If a caper bud is left on the bush it opens into a spectacular white and violet flower that lasts one day, and what follows is the alcaparrón: an elongated green fruit the size of a small olive, hanging on a long stalk, seedy and mild where the bud is dense and pungent. Brined whole with the stalk left on, it becomes one of the standard saucers of the Spanish bar, set down beside a vermouth or a dry sherry at midday and eaten by holding the stalk and taking the whole thing in one bite. The seeds pop faintly. It is closer in spirit to an olive than to a caper. Ballobar, a village of a few hundred people in Huesca, has built an identity on them and holds an annual caper festival; Murcia, Andalusia, and Mallorca grow the bulk of the Spanish crop. Spain is in fact the world's great caper processor rather than its great grower, importing much of its raw material from Morocco and Turkey and finishing and exporting it under Spanish labels, but the alcaparrón on the counter is generally local, because it is bulky, cheap, and not worth shipping far. The word arrived with the plant's Arab reorganisation. Andalusi Arabic al-kabar gave Spanish alcaparra and thence alcaparrón, displacing whatever Latin had left behind, which is a small linguistic monument to the fact that Iberia had capers growing wild on its own hillsides throughout the Roman centuries and only got properly organised about them under al-Andalus. The method below is a lactic brine rather than a vinegar pickle. It takes about a month and produces something rounder and less shrill than the commercial vinegar-packed version.
Fresh caperberries are seasonal and are sold in high summer by Mediterranean greengrocers and by growers online; in Spain they appear in markets from July. If none can be had, nasturtium seed pods take exactly the same treatment and are the classic northern European stand-in. They keep for a year refrigerated in their brine and will slowly soften over that time. Top up the brine if the level drops. The same method works for caper buds, though buds are better dry-salted than brined: layer them with an equal weight of coarse salt, turn daily, drain the liquid that comes out, and re-salt after a week. In a Spanish bar the saucer usually holds them alone. At home they go into ensaladilla, alongside boquerones, into potato salads, and onto a board with cured meats and cheese. Do not chop them; the point is the single-bite whole fruit.
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