Pickled

When I was a wee lad, growing up in the Pioneer Valley, life was good. I played Little League baseball, swam in the river, and was a Boy Scout.

My mom was a southern belle. She grew up in the middle of nowhere on the border of Alabama and Mississippi near a wide spot on Route 84 known as Isney. She never had a college degree but she could take shorthand and type like the dickens. And she could cook.

One of my favorite memories is of the year she cooked a suckling pig for Christmas. Complete with an apple in its mouth and a cranberry necklace, I can still remember her proudly wheeling it out on the “tea cart” to the applause of the eager guests.

She also made pickles. Bread & Butter pickles with mustard seeds and peppercorns in the jar. Each year she’d enter her pickles, and a few other canned goods, into the competition at Northampton’s Three Country Fair. She’d often win a blue or red ribbon for her efforts!

Overwhelmed with cucumbers from Square 1 Farm, I decided to give Bread & Butter Pickles a shot myself. I thought I’d step it up a notch by using both green and yellow varieties of cukes.  I found a recipe on-line that I didn’t read close enough. It called for packing the cucumbers in ice, compressing them with a gallon of vinegar or similar weight, and then waiting for three hours for the ice to melt. Unfortunately, I chose to begin preparing this recipe around 8:00 PM.

Just after midnight, my first attempt at vinegar-cured gourds was placed on the cooling racks. I managed to create seven pint-sized jars of potentially pickled plantae. These better be good.