Lunch in the South requires a pickle. Often dinner requires one as well. Breakfasts in Alabama have been known to sport a pickle if it is hot outside, which is about 83% of the time.
Southerners love sweet pickles. Bread ’n butter pickles are also perfectly acceptable options for any meal except grits. Grits are no friend of pickles, by the way. This feud goes back to the King James Bible, or so I’ve been told.
Southerners are known worldwide (or at least the world between Georgia and Texas) for these two sugary, vinegar-soaked cucumbers. We’ll even eat a cuc snapped right off the pungent vine if the mood hits us.
My grandmother made every pickle I ever ate until I was 18 years old when I left for the University of Alabama (where she sent me pickle packages often). Her recipes were usually some form of sweet or sweet and sour pickles, although she did it differently every time she canned a mess, making absolute replication impossible. She was sneaky that way.
Her inconsistencies made for consistently tasty pickles, however. But my tastes have changed over the last few years, and while I will never turn up my nose at a sweet or bread ’n butter pickle, dill pickles are my favorite version of a gourd’s twisted sister today.
Last year we made our own dill pickles and at the risk of sounding uppity, they just may have been the best I have ever eaten. Burning my hand trying to fish the boiling Ball jar out of the water may have prejudiced my opinion, to be sure, since when you suffer to acquire something, it is all the more valuable. Everyone who tasted one of those homemade pickles grunted after the first bite like a fat man unbuttoning his pants after a heavy meal. In June, though, I found a serious competitor to my pickles in the deli section of Kroger.
Finding them was hardly an accident. I had a jar of trusty Vlasic dills in my cart when a man of experience with some type of logo printed on his shirt approached me and converted me to his sour religion.
“You like dill pickles?” he asked, staring at my Vlasics.
“I do,” I said, suspecting a forthcoming sales pitch. What came, however, was a heartfelt testimony of pure belief not unlike my mother used to exhibit at West Highland Baptist Church.
“If you are a pickle man, like myself,” he said holding my cart for effect, “let me introduce you to the best dill pickle you will ever eat.”
“I have been introduced to that pickle,” I said. “I made a whole shelf-full last year and just recently ran dry.”
“I beg to differ, sir,” he said. His face rippled into a sincere rictus like that of a head coach recruiting for an SEC team. He grabbed a jar of Boar’s Head Kosher Dill Whole Pickles and tossed it from hand to hand like a cold football. “This, right here, will change your mind, my friend.”
He handed me the jar and didn’t ask my permission as he pulled the Vlasics from my cart.
“I’ll return these,” he said. “If you don’t like those Boar’s Heads, just bring them back, no questions.” He smiled confidently. “I am certain that won’t happen, though. Absolutely certain.”
It did not return the pickles. I ate the entire jar in less than three days. Boar’s Head matched my pickles crunch for crunch. I was humbled.
I never saw Mr. Pickle (as I’ have come to call him) again. I suspect he worked for Boar’s Head. After several jars, it does not matter. I am now a Boar’s Head pickle man. It was not his words that convinced me. The pickles performed as advertised.
I use them for everything, including eating them right out of the jar, putting them on burgers and using them in my infamous grilled chicken salad (which will be another blog soon).
I am munching one as I type this sentence, my keyboard smelling of garlic and dill and vinegar. The crispy taste reminds me of something my father once told me:
“Son, you may experience a lot of things in life, both good and bad, but when you get right down to it, there is nothing in the world like a damned good pickle.”