My Grandmother's Kitchen

My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook. As a child, I liked her cooking best of all the places I was able to pull up a chair to a table. Her fruit pies were incredible, I liked the blueberry best. She made everything from scratch, and she canned.

Recipes were closely held by her. My mother swears her mother used no written recipes at all, that everything was in her head. My mother has some recipes like this, prepared so often there is no need for a written reinforcement, although there are cookbooks and cooking magazines scattered throughout my mother's house. My grandmother's cooking was like a family's oral history, passed from one generation to the next.

Unfortunately, as I child I barely glimpsed at this rich heritage. My grandmother who ran her kitchen like a German battleship, did not deem my mother worthy to inherit. I remember being sent from the kitchen in tears one late summer day after breaking a jar I was filling with sliced cucumbers.

My grandmother canned everything imaginable. She had racks built in her basement to hold this bounty. Going to the basement to fetch a jar of dill pickles was a bit like going to a grocery store, for all the efficiency of her ordered shelving, with jars lined up with precision, neatly labeled.

Her dill pickles were really crunchy, a feat not easy to duplicate, and which I have yet to achieve. Packed with these pickles would be a couple carrot and celery sticks, heads of fresh dill, garlic cloves, red peppers, and onion. In addition to spices, she also used alum.

I asked her what alum was, and I remember her telling me it was the crunch. We shall see.

My canning bible, 'Ball's Blue Book of Preserving' does not include a single recipe with alum. Today, with the Internet, I am able to find dozen of recipes for dill pickles using alum. Although, they will not be my grandmother's dill pickles, perhaps they will be close. I also know it is important to take a fork and pierce the pickles several times with the tines and removing a tiny bit of each end of the pickle is equally important to the crunch.

Today's recipe is a simple one from my childhood, a simple vinegary pickle:

Select a largish cucumber. Slice it into crosswise circular slices, 1/4" thick. Place in a plastic or glass bowl. Cover with cider vinegar. Weigh the slices with a small glass plate. Cover with plastic wrap.

The vinegary pickles will be ready to eat in one week.

Pickles

When I was a kid the word "cucumber" was as foreign as finding a Thai food restaurant in central Wisconsin. Everything, whether the plant, the vegetable clinging to the vine, the slices on a hamburger, or the things stored in huge vats lining many roads in quasi-industrial agricultural areas; was a pickle, brined or not.

The word "pickle" persists in my vocabulary for each of these, and linguistically identifies me as a native of a place and time in history when Wisconsin's cucumber harvest was an important economic feature of our landscape here.

Migrant workers harvested cucumbers, or pickles.

Right along side of them were many white kids, whose parents put in a half acre or acre as a summer job for their kids. Typically, an efficient picker could keep up with the four-day rotation of picking down an acre of well-grown, irrigated cukes. Picking that acre, made me rich in teenage parlance, with a couple thousand dollars in my pocket after spending a few hundred in those days for all the shoes, clothing, and accessories a teenage girl would want, in addition to any original garments I would sew copying Vogue designs from pattern books.

We, my two older sisters and I, would get up about 6:00 or 6:30, and be in the field by 7:00. Our goal was to finish picking by 1:00 P. M. The mornings would sometimes be cool, sometimes in the 50s. As the course of the sun reached its zenith, it would find us stripped down to blue jeans and bikini tops. By 5:00 P.M., we would be sorting our pickles at a huge pickle sorter from #1s to #7s. The #1s would pay as much as $24 per hundred pounds; the #7s about $1.50. Sometimes I would make a couple hundred dollars for a half days work. It was probably the higher dollar per hour rate I will ever make in my life.

Those days are long past. I don't know anyone white kids that pursued the pickle as feverishly as I did. Now cucumbers are harvested once or twice by hand, typically by male migrants (versus whole families of kids 10 and up when I was a kid). Then they are picked by machines that tear up the vines and the harvest is done. The fields are staggered so the human pickers pick numerous field in succession as each comes ready to harvest.

I have three short rows of pickles in the family garden. They are just loaded with blossoms. I think they are probably a higher percentage male blossoms than the vines I picked when young (5% were typically male then as they would bear no pickles). Each four days I pick, and I pick them all in one pass, I get just a 5-gallon pail of pickles. And each four days I have to decide what I shall do with these beautiful pickles.

I have made relish. I have some brined to make sweet icicle pickles. Last Saturday, I decided on gherkins. My son wants some very crispy dill slices for burgers. I have also made a Greek cucumber and yogurt salad.

I can't imagine a garden without pickles. And although they are "really" cucumbers, having not been brined, for me I grow pickles.

This week: My favorite pickle recipes!