Pickles of The Season

On cuisine, preservation, and universality.

In the fall of 2019, I took a break from work at a Basque restaurant in New York City and flew to the Iberian peninsula. I went alone, driving an incredibly unpractical rented mini-van along the coast of the Bay of Biscay and through the mountains of Galicia. Over the course of ten days, I hopped around the various regions of northern Spain and Portugal, sipping on Asturian sidra and snacking on anchovies and manchego along the way.

On my first night in Lisbon, I happened upon a natural wine bar called Senhor Uva. The room was like a subterranean cave, with one large window sitting at ground level with the inclined street. I perched on a barstool reading a book and watching the feet of passersby, eating an assortment of made-in-house snacks—pistachios roasted with lime, sourdough served with salted butter and orange zest, and a bowl of “pickles of the season.”

Photo from Senhor Uva, Facebook

The pickles were described to me as an assortment of vegetables from the current and previous season’s harvest, made with experimental aromatics like saffron and orange peel. The bowl was bursting with flavor and colors that bordered on neon, with cauliflower the shade of a marigold and fuchsia-tinted turnips.

It was this vibrant dish of vegetables that sparked my interest in pickles and pickling. Several months after returning, I was asked to be the featured chef for a dinner series, an event with the goal of bringing together people from different backgrounds over a shared meal. The menu featured my own version of “pickles of the season,” complete with radishes and dill, winter squash and cardamom, and preserved meyer lemons.

When I wrote my recipe for pickles on Monday, I received the expected amount of confusion and surprise from subscribers about the fact that cucumbers had not taken center stage (on a phone call with one friend, she excitedly exclaimed that until now she had thought that “a pickle was just a pickle!”). In truth, the cucumber pickles we know and love in America are not as universal as we might imagine. The act of pickling, however, most certainly is.

In a world divided by country boundaries, trade agreements, and cultural disagreements, pickles serve as one of few connecting threads. Nearly every cuisine has it’s own form of pickling and preserving, making it one of the most ancient and universal foodways. On a global scale, the art of pickling can be traced back to the days of Mesopotamia (roughly 2400 B.C), gaining popularity in Ancient Rome and Egypt where pickled vegetables were credited with providing people with health and strength. Throughout history, they have been rationed out for armies, sailors, and citizens in times of war or recession.

Just like sugarcane and widespread disease, pickles were brought to the Americas by Christopher Columbus. Later, increasing immigration of Eastern European Jews introduced the kosher dill pickle to areas like Brooklyn, where it gained popularity. Cucumber pickles were later marketed in one of what is perhaps one of the most successful food branding campaigns of modern history—the Heinz company is said to have handed out free “pickle pins” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and then subsequently encouraged legislation against all of their competitors who were using more additives and preservatives. As a result, a near complete market domination on the part of the Heinz corporation is largely to blame for the monopoly of classic cucumber pickles that we see on American supermarket shelves today.

Around the world (and in America too) pickles take on many more diverse forms. In a quick flip through ten cookbooks of various cuisines that I pulled from my shelf, every single index has at least one variety of pickle. In Senegal by Pierre Tham, it is pickled mango; Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish includes a recipe for “Green Chile and Cherry Tomato Pickle”; Edna Lewis writes of pickled watermelon rinds, as well as a wide assortment of preserved fruits and jams in her classic American farmstead cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking.

In the most simple sense, pickles serve as a unique form of preservation. Whether it be peak season produce or the year’s best catch (think mussels escabeche, a popular Iberian form of vinegar preserved seafood), a sealed can or jar offers a snapshot into another time. For some (such as the aforementioned Eastern European Jews) the sharp flavor of vinegar infused vegetables also provided a welcome relief from the monotony of otherwise bland cuisines or dishes. As such, pickled foods tend to be some of the most versatile and accessible on the market.

The act of pickling has historically served as a way to preserve not only the products themselves, but also the cuisines which they accompany. In the same way that recipes are passed through generations, so are techniques and traditions. The popularity of pickles and pickling is a testament to the preservation of produce as well as a collective history, uniting us across the constraints of time and cuisine.

While there is surely no shortage of variation, the formula has stayed largely the same since the earliest days of humanity, and remains one of our strongest universal bonds—just add vinegar.

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