Escovitch Sauce (Jamaican Pickled Vegetables)

The Jamaican dressing for fried fish — bell pepper, carrot, onion and scotch bonnet in spiced vinegar, poured hot over the fish and left to sit. And the name is the payoff: escovitch is the same word as Spanish escabeche, from Persian sikbag — ‘vinegar stew.‘

Ingredients

• 1 cup white vinegar (5% acidity)
• 1/4 cup water
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon pickling salt
• 1 large onion, sliced into rings
• 1 carrot, julienned
• 1 red bell pepper, julienned
• 1 green bell pepper, julienned
• 1 chayote (cho-cho), julienned (optional, traditional)
• 1-2 scotch bonnet peppers, sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 tablespoon whole allspice berries (Jamaican pimento)
• 1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme
• 2 bay leaves

Directions

Key ingredients

Black Pepper · Salt

1. Step 1 - Cut the vegetables in matching julienne. Everything roughly the same size, so it cooks evenly and looks right piled over a fish. The onion goes in rings rather than julienne, because it is the one you want visible.
2. Step 2 - Build the pickling liquid. In a non-reactive saucepan combine the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, allspice, peppercorns, thyme and bay. Bring to a boil.
3. Step 3 - Add the vegetables and stop early. Add the onion, carrot, peppers, chayote, scotch bonnet and garlic. Return to a boil, then immediately take it off the heat — no more than 2 minutes. This is the step that decides everything. The vegetables should be barely softened and still bright and crunchy. Cook them through and you have a limp stew.
4. Step 4 - Use it hot, over hot fish. The traditional service is to fry a whole snapper or fillets hard and crisp, lay them in a dish, and pour the hot escovitch straight over. The vegetables keep cooking gently in their own heat and the fish takes up the vinegar.
5. Step 5 - Then let it sit. Escovitch is better after several hours and is traditionally eaten at room temperature or cold the next day. It is not a hot dish, despite being assembled hot.
6. Keeps 2 weeks refrigerated on its own as a pickle.

Notes

The etymology is my favourite thing in this whole part of the collection.

Escovitch traces like this: Spanish escabeche from Andalusian Arabic as-sukkabaj from Arabic as-sikbaja from Middle Persian sikbag, which is sik “vinegar” plus bag/ba “broth, stew.”

The word means “vinegar stew,” in Persian. The original sikbag was meat cooked in a sweet-sour sauce with vinegar and honey or date molasses — a Sasanian court dish, not a fish preparation at all. It went west with the Arab conquest into Spain, changed from a meat stew into a method for keeping fried fish, crossed the Atlantic with Spanish ships, and turned up in the Caribbean. A fried fish on a Jamaican beach is called, in a language nobody there speaks, “vinegar stew.”

Frying first is not incidental. Because the fish is cooked with heat before it meets the vinegar, the acid here is doing no food-safety work on parasites — the frying did that. This is genuinely a marinade rather than a cure, which makes it a different craft from pickled herring or my pickled salmon. Compare Fish, Freezing to Destroy Parasites (Reference), which those recipes depend on and this one does not.

Allspice is not optional. Jamaican pimento is the flavour that makes this taste Jamaican rather than generically pickled. Use whole berries.

Versus pikliz: see Pikliz (Haitian Pickled Cabbage). Escovitch has the wider vegetable mix and goes over fish; pikliz is cabbage-forward and lives in a jar.