While everyone in the world eats some variety of pickled vegetables, the Ashkenazi Jewish love affair with kosher dill pickles often takes on religious proportions.
Associations with these crunchy, delectable, sour, garlicky morsels are emotional.
According to Rabbi Gil Marks, in his “Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World” (Wiley Publishing, 2004), the Jewish love of pickles dates to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, where a large variety of pickled produce was standard fare.
“Over the centuries Ashkenazim annually filled crocks or barrels with cabbage, cucumbers or beets, leaving them in root cellars to provide zest to dining for much of the year,” he wrote.
When those Jews immigrated to New York in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century, they established a thriving pickle industry on the Lower East Side.
Though Jewish life on New York’s Lower East Side has all but vanished, a couple of pickle stores remain today, Marks wrote.
And though the centuries-old Jewish pickle-making traditions are dying out, there is a dedicated core of pickle mavens living in communities around the U.S. that carry on the love affair.
One of them, Milwaukee West Sider Caron Rice, by all accounts a baleboste (excellent homemaker) and a trained chef, turns her kitchen into a neighborhood pickle production center for a couple of days every August.
Agulnick’s recipe
Together with neighbors Donald Grande and Reuben Kahn, Rice puts up almost 200 two-quart jars of pickles based on the original, hand-written recipe of her grandmother, Ann Agulnick.
These take the families through a year of pickle heaven and, Rice said in a recent interview with The Chronicle, “If any of us run out, we share.”
Grande and Kahn joined Rice, she said, “because they love the pickles and they wanted them for themselves.”
But in fact, Grande said, “my wife loves them and that’s why I make them.” Another reason he’s joined in with Rice for the past seven years is that he also likes to serve them to guests on Shabbat, he said.
For Rice, pickle-making is a masorah, a family tradition. She learned to make pickles from her grandmother, who came from Russia.
“Our family always used to get together every Friday night and my grandmother always served her pickles with the chicken soup and either chicken or a roast…,” she said.
Rice used to buy her 1500 pickling cucumbers from a farm. She started ordering them from Sendik’s on Downer a few years ago when the farm went to a “pick your own” system.
“The trick is to get different sizes,” Rice explained, “so you can get more pickles in each of the jars.”
Pickling cucumbers are graded for size by the number that fit in a bushel basket. Rice orders 500s and 800s, the smallest available. “We make the pickles when the crop is ready, generally at the beginning of August,” she said.
Rice said that they usually leave the pickles sealed until after the Jewish month of Tishrei, as “it is customary not to eat sharp foods” then. She and her family and friends prefer to eat sweet things during the month of the High Holy Days to reflect the happiness of the season.
Beginning the two-day pickle-making process in the evening, Rice, Grande and Kahn, each with their own jobs, set out the jars, put in the spices and peppers, and clean, peel and cut the carrots.
The next morning, as her grandmother did, Rice washes the cucumbers in her clothes washing machine, skipping the spin cycles. Then she, Grande and Kahn stuff the cucumbers, peppers, carrots and dill into the jars, she said.
“My grandmother always put just one piece of carrot in a jar,” Rice said. Because the carrot is denser and absorbs less flavor, its taste is slightly milder than that of the cucumbers. Since she and her siblings fought over that one piece of carrot, Rice loads her pickle jars with carrots, she said.
Rice explained that one of the secrets of these Jewish pickles is that they are made in a salt brine, unlike “99 percent of the pickles you buy in the store,” which are in a vinegar brine.
“I make many large pots of brine,” using kosher salt and cold water in a specific ratio. “If you don’t, you won’t have enough salinity to kill the bacteria,” she said.
For more on safety in pickling, see the National Center for Home Preservation’s Web site, www.uga.edu/nchfp.
Ann Agulnick’s pickles (with adaptations by Caron Rice)
(for a two-quart jar)
Place spices and peppers in jar:
2 1/2 teaspoons pickling spice
(anything that is a whole spice is kosher and does not need a
rabbinic seal of approval.)
2 whole stalks of dill
2 whole cloves of garlic
one each, banana pepper, jalapeno pepper and chili pepper, cut in half, with seeds
Fit as many cucumbers as possible into jars (larger ones at the bottom) and stuff julienne pieces of carrot in the holes. Add dill, folded in an accordion shape with stalk wrapped around middle to make a bundle.
Make brine separately, using 2 tablespoons of kosher salt thoroughly dissolved in one quart of cold water.
Place a fresh canning lid on top and seal, making sure it’s absolutely flat and makes a tight seal. Turn upside down on newspapers and leave for several days to make sure jar is not leaking.
As the pickles cure, they change color. After a month or six weeks, Rice, Grande and Kahn open the first pungent jars.
“If you want them to be really hot, you open the jar and put it in the fridge,” Rice said. Admitting that she doesn’t eat them because they burn her lips, she said that her children, now grown, love them.
“Just to tell you how excited my kids get about this; when my daughter Illana went to Israel for seminary, she took pictures of the pickles and this is what she used to decorate her walls,” Rice said.
‘ The Nye Fizzies’
Another local pickle maven is research scientist Steve Nye. He now lives in Mequon with wife Stacey and sons Zak, 12, and Jesse, 10.
His family has a tradition of making “the Nye Fizzies,” so called because they’re so fresh they fizz in the mouth.
“I’ve been making them with my parents since I was five,” Nye said. But now, he said, “My quest is to make a pickle my wife likes.”
“My latest thought about pickles is that everybody has their own taste,” he said. “There is no universal pickle that everybody loves. I love them half-and-half, Zak likes them overdone. My wife cannot stand the Nye pickle.”
The Nye’s recipe also has been handed down through the generations, and the family members drove to area farms for the cucumbers.
When the farmers went to the “pick your own” system, Steve Nye “really got into” picking, he said.
“When you’re out there in the field you almost can’t pass up a good-looking pickle,” he said. “You go for the 800s because they stay crunchy.”
There have been obstacles in the Nye pickle path over the years. As a busy father/chauffeur, he didn’t think he’d manage to pick his pickles on time. With only one hour between work at his lab in the county research park and one son’s soccer practice, Nye thought, “It’s over,” he said.
“And then it was like God was looking down on me. I made every [traffic] light. I changed clothes in the car. I picked 300 pickles in 58 minutes. Then I cut the dill and loaded it onto the hood of my car.”
Another year, he didn’t receive the postcard usually sent by the farm that had been supplying their pickles. When he drove out to investigate he found a small hand-lettered sign that read: “Out of business; no more pickles.”
“I called my mom and told her we had a crisis situation,” he said. “My mom, Natalie, is the general. She runs the ship and you don’t want to disappoint Mom.”
But Natalie Nye wasn’t resigned to defeat. She located pickling cucumbers for sale at a farm stand at the corner of Donges Bay and Port Washington Roads.
To Steve Nye, freshness is paramount. He makes his pickles the day they are picked.
One year, he called the farmer to confirm that the pickles would be arriving the next day as expected, only to discover from an offhand remark, that the pickles had already been picked.
“It was about six o’clock at night, but the Nyes don’t leave their pickles sitting around. So I activated the pickling team,” Nye said.
He called his parents. Marvin, his father, “went to the store for the salt. I got the dill and the jars,” he said.
“We were a machine. Everyone had a job. My dad cut the dill. I cut the garlic, Zak and Jesse counted 25 pickles into each two-quart jar. Mom loaded in the salt and spices. Dad boiled lids. I sealed jars. Within two hours we had over 40 jars.”
Nye said he would like eventually to start growing his own cucumbers. “My ultimate goal is to go from seed to jar,” he said.
Nye Family Sour Pickles
1 teaspoon pickling spice
1 heaping tablespoon kosher salt
fresh dill sprigs in the bottom and on top of the jar
a few pieces of garlic, cut in small pieces
Fill jars with filtered water and seal. Place pickles on shelf for three days and then move to the refrigerator.
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