Grandma's pickle jars hold our family's four seasons

Behind my grandmother's stove a row of pickle jars stood against the wall, like a troop at attention.

They were coarse clay, wide-bellied and narrow-mouthed, with a channel running around the rim. Grandma called it a water seal. Put the lid down and the dirt outside can't get in, and the flavor inside can't get out, and the vegetables age quietly in the dark. She said this for my benefit. I was seven, crouched beside the jars watching her pour clean water into the channel, and I thought they were the most mysterious objects in the world, holding vegetables that could do magic.

Her jars had a strict roster. Spring was potherb mustard: cut, spread in the yard until it wilted, rubbed through with coarse salt, packed down, weighted with the bluestone that had come down to her from her own grandmother. Summer was long beans, the tender thumb-thick ones, coiled in handful by handful. Pickled and fried with minced pork, they could get you through two extra bowls of rice. Autumn belonged to dried radish, cut into strips, sunned to seven parts dry, tossed with Sichuan pepper and chili. Winter was the solemn one: cured pork and fermented fish. Seal the mouth of the jar and it is New Year.

The whole family's palate was domesticated by those jars. My mother says that in her first year of marriage she couldn't eat Grandma's sour beans, they were too sour, and in her second year, visiting her own mother, she found herself missing that sourness. My uncle was in the army far away, and when his leave ended there were always two jars in his luggage. My aunt married into another province, and what she craved most was potherb mustard fried with soybeans.

The jars were also a distribution system. Every time one was opened, Grandma divided by household, into washed-out old jam jars, one per family, and she'd have something to say if anyone got more or less than their share. She had a line she liked: "If the pickles don't split, the family won't scatter."

Seven years after Grandma died, my mother started making potherb mustard herself.

The first batch went badly. It was so salty it was bitter. My mother called my uncle: how exactly did Mum press it with that stone? He couldn't say either, and the two of them pieced it back together over the phone from what each of them remembered. The second batch was better. The day the third was opened, my mother took one bite and went silent. She told my aunt, "That's the taste."

I tasted it. Honestly, it was still a little short of Grandma's. But I knew why she was crying. It wasn't about a mouthful of pickle. It was that her hands had finally met her mother's hands.

A family's taste is carried down jar by jar, one generation to the next. What gets passed on is not only the recipe. It is the fact that somebody is keeping track of the one bite you like.

Last year two new jars arrived in my own kitchen. I tried my first batch of sour beans. It failed, went off, and I mourned it for a long time as I poured it out. My mother consoled me over the phone. "Jars know people. Pickle a few more times and it'll know you."

The second batch, this summer, worked. The day I opened it the sour smell came up sharp. I took a photo and put it in the family group chat. My uncle answered within seconds: "Save me a jar!"

So the jars have started their work again, pickling the family back together.

Grandma had two iron rules for pickling. First, the hands must be clean — "a jar's fate is the fate of the hands that fill it." Second, the heart must be quiet; she never walked into the kitchen in the middle of an argument. She said salt knows people, and a hot temper can't make good pickles. I didn't believe it then. I thought it was an old woman's superstition. This year, standing in front of my own jar, I understood. It was never superstition. It was one person's seriousness toward food and toward the days themselves. Cheat it and it will go sour in your face.