Wintertime, Local Foods, and Pickling
By Karina | November 22, 2010
I went to one of the greatest festivals ever today, and this is kind of an excuse to write about it - it was the 13th Annual Pickle Festival in Rosendale NY, and my partner and I showed up at 4PM, bought about $50 worth of pickles, then purchased and consumed fried dill pickle slices, a pickle on a stick (really two, because they were so small) and half-price BBQ sandwiches before swooping out in a blaze of glory (quite literally hopping a fence on our way out of the festival).
And then on the way home I started thinking about how complicated it can be to eat a locally based diet that is well balanced in the wintertime when you live in the northeast, as I do. We start to get our CSA shipments from savvy farmers who use greenhouses and cold frames in early June, and this year our CSA wrapped up mid-October. There are still local foods available at farmers markets but they’re mostly what I would call the “heavy crops,” potatoes and hard squash and the like - though there are some delicious fall greens as well.
(Sidebar: growing seasons are crazy! When I heard that Florida has two growing seasons with a nothing-grows-because-it’s-too-hot-season in between, I was really surprised, though I shouldn’t have been.)
So how does one do a good job eating local when not much grows during the winter? I am the first one to plead CSA fatigue and fess up to eating cheese and crackers for several winter months at a time, but in an embarrassingly cliqued way I find myself trying to work with my partner to feed his kids as many vegetables as I can possible trick them into eating - year round! which makes for some serious planning issues in the winter.
I do try hard to preserve as much food as I can during the summer that is excess from our CSA, but as a person with a full time job, lots of hobbies, and also part time kid duty, I honestly don’t have time to go out and source the quantity of vegetables that I would need to preserve to put us through the entire winter. Plus, the kids really only like to eat simple vegetables like corn, beans, and peas - so while I can easily freeze a whole boatload of the first two, it will be super boring for ME to only eat that stuff all winter long.
I did just sign up for a winter CSA share - not a traditional fresh food share, but a group called Winter Suns Farms, which works with local farmers to freeze and package produce during the summer, and then distributes it in the winter. They have once-a-month pickups around me, and I think it’s a good bridge between eating local and buying frozen produce in the grocery stores. However, this is going to be the thing that pushes us to buy a small stand-alone freezer, because right now our fridge-freezer is packed with chopped tomatoes and corn and other amazing CSA vegetables.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about PICKLES. I am sure that pickles don’t have the kind of packed nutrition that you need to stay balanced during the winter, and besides, most people don’t enjoy pickles enough to eat as many of them as you’d need to match a serving of vegetables. (They’re condiments, after all!) I started to experiment with pickling this year, and I learned that by gum! I need to pickle more vegetables, all the time! It’s so easy, and the results are so delicious.
I grew up in a family that had a fancy dish of pickles - usually sweet gherkins or cornichons - on the table at every big holiday supper. So I spent a few minutes of hard core googling before I came across this AMAZING article from one of my favorite hometown newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. When I read the title “A Tradition to Relish: Pickle trays add colorful snap to holiday table” I knew I had found exactly the back-up I needed to prove that my family wasn’t just some pickle crazed group in Eastern Tennessee. AND it backs up what I’ve been thinking about the use of pickles in the winter:
… pickled and preserved foods of all kinds meant survival in Colonial times, when autumn was devoted to smoking, pickling and drying.
In that era, pickles and relishes were “a seasoning and a flavoring to enhance the very dull winter foods you’re eating, which are pretty salty and pretty yucky” and short on nutrition.
There was “nothing green to eat. That’s so hard to conceive of in this day. You had nothing green from the killing frost to late March … all of humanity had nothing to eat but what they preserved,” says Ms. Ingraham, who teaches open-hearth cooking.
So even though pickles won’t give you the 4 1/2 cups of fruit and vegetables recommended by the USDA, they do serve a valuable purpose in seasoning food that has been preserved and might now be a little bland or overcooked, thanks to the safety requirements of the pressure canner.
Here’s a big question for you - from that same article:
“It’s interesting … I can’t believe there’s a full-course Thanksgiving menu out there that doesn’t have it. I wonder if it isn’t said anymore but everyone knows it’s kind of out there.”
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Yes we do pickles of all kinds. At Grandma’s pickled gurkins and carrots were a standard before supper, or any time snack. I eat a fair bit of pickled beets. And things like saurkraut are actually packed with vit C. My mom’s favorite is pickled beans and carrots (the yellow wax beans), it is the one thing I totally suck at making!
now that you mention it - my grandma’s holiday table always had a couple different kinds of pickles on it.
thanks for the reflection on and history of pickles on our winter tables.
sweet pickles and/or mustard pickles (with cauliflower) were a staple at all of our dinners, as well as pickled beets and my grandmother’s bread and butter pickles, a salty-and-savoury non-dill pickle mix made with cucumber and red peppers. But I grew up in a rural area that remained largely deprived - my parents never had green salad until they were well into their mid twenties, as the greens were simply not available. Pickles were definitely another way to dress up the plain meat (or fish) and potatoes cuisine that was the norm there for many months of the year, and while perhaps not as nutritionally sound as fresh veggies, certainly pickles and preserves helped stave off massive malnutrition and/or starvation in long winters.
I have several glass pickle trays that I have inherited from various family members and/or garage sales. I used several just a few weeks ago to serve veggie crudites and pickled onions and sweet gherkins! We were having a party with cold cuts and cold salads and the pickle tray was a perfect accent.
There is a famous story in my family of when I was 5 or so. I intensely loved sweet pickles and I had a limit of how many I was allowed to eat at any one meal, since if I had my way I would eat pickles and nothing else. At this meal I was fishing for the last sweet pickle in a giant jar and I ended up tipping the ENTIRE jar of pickle juice onto my father’s plate, which was filled to the brim as he had just sat down to eat. My father DETESTS pickles. So, another argument for the tray: avoid spilled pickle juice and ruined suppers!!!
Oh, I love pickles. And olives. I ate a whole jar of olives one Christmas (my grandmother said, “Let her go!”) with the expected results. I still love them! The Wegman’s olive bar is my favorite place to indulge.
This makes me think I’ll need to pick up some pickles for our Thanksgiving table. Tiny sweet gherkins and black olives are the norm for our family, but maybe I should add my favorite picked okra too. Or caper berries, if I can find them. I wish I’d thought about this earlier so I could have picked up some local versions at our farmers market!
Oh yes, the pickle tray was always my favorite at Thanksgiving, but maybe that was because they’d set it out on the table before dinner, when your tummy is rumbling from all the good smells coming out of the kitchen, and we’d descend upon it like a pack of vultures. But, I still love pickles today, and we’ll have homemade pickled peppers, beets and radishes on our table for the holiday.
I’m so excited that you all love pickles as much as I do! and it’s HILARIOUS how we would just eat lots and lots of pickles at the risk of spoiling our suppers.
Pipp - I am just getting into pickling and I find it to be easier than other types of preserving - well, faster at least! what is it that you have a hard time with?
delqc - that’s really interesting about your family, and where they live, and pickles as “seasoning.”
oddly enough I just don’t do ths well, I can make jam, clear jellies, can stuff and make syrups. I think as I am not a super fan of pickles I don’t have the taste right for this and can’t go with the smell or texture the same way. Mom says they are too acidic, so I have to back off on the vinager. I will get this eventually it was just weird that I totally suck at it, yet making something like a super clear fruit jelly I find really easy.