Happily in a Pickle

That is a pickle—even a dilly of a pickle. Perhaps you’ve gotten yourself into a pickle.

Such colloquialisms convey a sense of distress. And from the cucumber’s perspective, involuntarily immersed into inhospitably acidic vinegar, you can sense the metaphorical point.

Before refrigerators and freezers, food-preservation techniques like drying, salting and sugaring prolonged our culled sustenance. But this preservationist trio sits alongside another time-honored technique: pickling.

As Lucy Norris notes in “The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink,” pickling likely originated in ancient Mesopotamia where folks preserved foods in saltwater pits. Colonists carried the practice to America in the 1600s—along with their words for “pickle,” like the Dutch pekel and German Pökel.

Later, during the Depression, “pickled homegrown food kept many American families from starvation,” writes Norris, noting that home pickling peaked in popularity during World War II, with our victory gardens and subsequent canning and pickling of the harvested bounty.

Preserving food in an acidic liquid or a brine has a denaturing effect, chemically altering the food while preventing microbial growth. The solution, quite often vinegar, causes the “pickling.” Salt, another key component, moderates this effect and draws liquid from the pickled food into the solution.

Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking”—required reading for culinologists from New York to New Delhi—taps some interesting global variations, including Japan’s pickled plums (umeboshi) and radishes (takuan), and “the highly spiced, multifarious pickled fruits and vegetables of India.” The South Pacific boasts its poi. And Korea offers a variety of kimchi—from mild to supernaturally spicy.

Although pickling never fell off the American map, manufacturers deliver the lion’s share of such foods these days. But creative chefs have recently breathed new life into the age-old scientific art of pickling. A recent Atlanta dining experience at Canoe found my barbecue pork belly appetizer atop jícama slaw and pickled Georgia peach. Ammo’s menu in Los Angeles boasts a seasonal pickle plate side. Chicago’s Scylla plates pairs sautéed soft-shell crab with pickled shallots and mushrooms, as well as sweet corn, pancetta and a roasted-garlic aïoli.

Although fermented cabbage (sauerkraut) and pickled chiles and olives have found widespread acceptance in the United States—with curious nods to pickled pig’s feet and eggs—plain, old pickled cucumbers, which have long taken on the transformative namesake “pickles,” are by far our favorite, as evidenced by their omnipresent location alongside noontime sandwiches from coast to coast.

But no ode to the obligatory pickle, be it process or product, would be complete without a nod to rise of the sweet-sour, startlingly colorful “Koolickles”—brought to life via a dose of Kool-Aid in the brine—found at roadside stands and convenience stores in the American south.

Crunch.