Pickling Bookmarks

by

Lauren Roberts

That pickle barrel was nearly as tall as I was at six years old, and certainly fatter. The wood was dark as if it had been burnt but it was sturdy and the two metal bands that held it together were clean. The metal handle on the wooden lid was heavy in a girl’s hand, so my grandmother would help me open it under the kindly but watchful eye of the proprietor. Inside was a pool full of pickles.

I was allowed to pick one, and I took my time in choosing the largest and most aromatic of the bunch. The smiling, white-aproned proprietor would lean over as I pointed to the one I wanted and with a quick dart of his silver tongs lift it out, place it in a piece of waxed paper and hand it to me.

That is one of the finest memories I have of the times I stayed with my grandmother on these childhood overnight excursions. And it may well account for my fondness for dill pickles to this day even though the days of the pickle barrel are, sadly, gone. 

Though this article is going to focus strictly on the cucumber variety, which is the most common variety of pickle in the U.S. However, pickles are more than cucumbers. They are edible products that include vegetables (kimchee being a famous Korean dish), fruit, fish, eggs, or meat (and the word can also refer to a mélange of ingredients that forms a sort of thick sauce that includes chutneys and relishes).

Pickles are found in all cultures and throughout history. In fact, pickled cucumbers have a history that goes back to around 2030 BC in Mesopotamia, when the seeds were brought from northern India to the Tigris valley.  Aristotle often praised their taste and healing effects around 350 B.C., and Julius Caesar’s soldiers were fed them to help them heal their wounds. They were also familiar to the ancient Egyptians, and Cleopatra even attributed some of her beauty to them. Foodstuffs sent home from the countries the Romans conquered often needed to be pickled for the journey, and they did so using vinegar, oil, brine and occasionally honey.

Pickles are edible products (vegetables, fruit, fish, eggs, meat) that have been preserved in an acid solution. The solution varies, but the result is the same: the pH of the pickle is decreased, which produces a preservative effect. Adding flavoring ingredients such as sugar, herbs, or spices gives pickles their unique taste.

In the UK, the most common pickle is a small onion in vinegar, but in the U.S. it is small cucumber or large gherkin in brine. This is what the many immigrants, especially those of Jewish heritage, brought with them when they arrived in America.

Pickling as mentioned above is a form of food preservation. It counteracts the growth of dangerous microorganisms that are always present on food and that, if left unchecked, be can illness. It’s the process of increasing a foodstuff’s acidity that is the  basis of pickling. This acid can either be added or be produced by the natural fermentation processes. Two basic types of pickling included a long fermentation-based period of up to several weeks where the food is “cured” at room temperature. The quick, unfermented pickling is made by adding acid such as vinegar. The pickling process has various techniques and elements:

• Acid-based pickles using vinegar that produce pickled onions, eggs, red cabbage, ginger, Italian vegetables, rollmop herrings (favored in Britain), pigs’ feet, sausages, and beetroot.
• Dry-salted pickles that are made by adding salt to fruits or vegetables and thus drawing the water from them by the process of osmosis, resulting in a fermentation process and a brine. The most common product in this category is sauerkraut, though Moroccan pickled limes and lemons are common as are plums in Japan.
• Brine-based pickles work by a combination of osmosis and fermentation. This method creates the gherkins and cucumbers so common in America.
• Lye-pickling (lye being an alkali traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes) works by breaking down the food matter as an aid to pickling. It’s mostly reserved for olives since olives cannot be eaten in their raw state. Lye removed the substances which would otherwise be toxic to the fermentation bacteria. Other lye-pickled products include the thousand-year-old eggs of China and the lutefisk (dried, salted cod) of Norway.
• Pickles in sugar are mostly fruits that are sometimes first pickled in vinegar before being stores in syrup or honey. Pickled peaches are an American example of these. Alternatively, a sweet-sour syrup can be used, made by adding sugar to vinegar. Examples of these include watermelon rinds, pickled walnuts (a British favorite), and mostarda di Cremona (an Italian pickle of mixed fruit and mustard seeds).

The word “pickle” comes from Middle English pikel. Its use is first recorded around 1400 and meant a spicy gravy or sauce served with meat or fowl. About the same time, Middle Dutch showed the word pekel, which meant a solution or spiced brine for preserving and flavoring food. They were so popular a popular snack that Christopher Columbus grew cucumbers on the island of Haiti for the purpose of pickling them. 

Queen Elizabeth I of England loved pickles, and William Shakespeare often peppered his plays with references to them both literally and metaphorically:

• “Oh, Hamlet, how camest thou in such a pickle?” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1)
• 'Tis a gentle man here a plague o' these pickle-herring! How now, sot!” (Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5.)
• “What say you? Hence, Horrible villain! or I'll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I'll unhair thy head: Thou shalt be whipp'd with wire and stew'd in brine, Smarting in lingering pickle.” (Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 5.)

Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer and cartographer for whom the U.S. is named, had been a pickle peddler in Seville, Spain before his voyages across the Atlantic. Food spoilage was enough of a problem on land, but the necessarily long sea voyages of the time made it a special concern, and he loaded up barrels of pickled vegetables onto his ships to ensure, as much as possible, healthy meals. But it was Columbus who is known to have grown cucumbers on the island of Haiti for the express intent of pickling them. It’s not surprising, therefore, that for Americans pickles most often refers to this vegetable.

Their introduction into the U.S. was through the waves of European immigrants who brought their own recipes from their homelands so it is no surprise that pickles have played a very large role in New York City’s history. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New York, Dutch farmers grew pickles in the area that is today Brooklyn. These crops were sold to dealers who cured them in large barrels with a variety of flavored brines and sold at stands along the streets. The area became the largest concentration of commercial picklers at the time. These were unregulated vendors, but they made the initial strides into what would become a major industry for companies like Heinz. Even Thomas Jefferson noted that on hot days in Virginia he knew of nothing  “more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar.” 

The New York Times, in a 2001 article titled “Let There Be Pickles” details a fascinating history of the city and the pickle, noting that the pickle “fed tenement dwellers and reminded many Eastern Europeans of the countries they had left behind.” So solidly are pickles entrenched in the city’s culture that they further noted, “pickles outlasted most other pushcart products; as late as the 1990’s, a vendor sold them from barrels at the end of the street.” And it still continues today, albeit on a less solid footing:

The mighty pickle is still a fixture in New York delis, where a half-sour spear is often wrapped up with each sandwich. At Guss’s Pickles, a 91-year-old establishment on Essex Street, customers come from around the block and around the world to buy sours, half sours, green tomatoes, red peppers and horseradish from barrels on the sidewalk.

But the briny, rough-skinned pickle that was once such an integral part of the city's landscape is in danger of becoming a memory. A century ago, New York was home to 200 family-run pickle shops, half of them on the Lower East Side, where wholesale cucumbers were sold. Over the years, however, they dwindled.

Back in Europe (and time), Napoleon Bonaparte also valued pickles as an asset to his soldiers’ health so at one point he offered the equivalent of $250,000 to anyone who could develop a way to preserve food safely. The man who won the prize in 1809, a confectioner named Nicholas Appert, figured out that if you removed the air from a bottled and boiled it, the food in it wouldn’t spoil. The process was called the “boiling water bath” and it is one of the culinary world’s most important and brilliant contributions to humankind’s history. This discovery was followed in 1858 by the development of the mason jar, by sterilization of milk by Louis Pasteur in 1860, and by the invention by Alfred Bernardin of the first metal tops to be used in commercial canning in 1881. All of this led the way for large-scale commercial operations, and in the nineteenth century, names that have since become big in pickle production—Heinz, Mount Olive, and Vlasic—started up.

In 1893, Heinz began to tout its “57 varieties” of pickles, preserves, and other jarred foods. In order to increase interest in its products, it took advantage of that year’s Chicago World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition) to hand out what became the most popular giveaway it ever had: the pickle pin. The pin was created by founder Henry Heinz to attract attention to his booth by offering this free gift. Originally, it was a charm, but it soon became a pin that has since gone on to become one of the world’s most famous collectibles.

But the bookmarks around which this article centers also have their fans. Originally, they were created and given away by Heinz salesmen to grocery stores which then used them as giveaway items in the first decade of the twentieth century. Now as then, they become popular collectibles for customers and fans of the company or of pickles in general. Their design is beautiful, and looking at these six bookmarks not only reinforces my affection for dill pickles, but for the memory of my grandmother and a local grocer who figured so prominently in those early days.

Bookmark specifications: Heinz Pickle Girls
Dimensions: Approximately 5" x 1 1/2"
Material: Paper
Manufacturer: Heinz Corporation
Date: 1900-1910
Acquired: eBay


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately the same number of books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.