Old-time picklers couldn’t accurately measure
the salt needed for making pickle brines, since
the density of commercially bought salt varied from
year to year. To get around this potential problem—too
little or too much salt can cause pickles to spoil—many
recipes recommended using "enough salt to float
an egg" in the brine. While this method yielded
fermented pickles that could keep all winter, they
were too salty to be eaten. Picklers had to soak
the pickles in water for days to make them edible.
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Pickles
played an important role in Colombus’s
discovery of America in 1492. Around the time
of Colombus, many transoceanic voyages were
thwarted because crews suffered from scurvy,
a disease caused by lack of vitamin C. Colombus’s
ship stocker, a man named Amerigo Vespucci,
stored ample quantities of vitamin C-rich pickles
on the
Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria,
helping to prevent scurvy outbreaks on the historic
voyage across the Atlantic. As it turns out,
America’s name is derived from the pickle
merchant Vespucci, who became an explorer.
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Today,
a common figurative sense for the word
pickle
is "troublesome situation"—as in
"you’ve gotten us into a pretty pickle."
About four hundred years ago, modern English borrowed
the word
pickle
, its literal meaning, and
this figurative sense from the Dutch, who expressed
a predicament with the phrase "in de pekel
zitten"—literally, to sit in the salty
solution used for preserving meats and vegetables.
Literary usages of the figurative sense include
Shakespeare’s
Tempest
, when Alonso asks
Trinculo, "How camest thou in this pickle?,"
and Lord Byron’s
Don Juan
: "The
Turkish batteries thrash'd them like a flail, Or
a good boxer, into a sad pickle."
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Many
cultures have historically fermented foods by burying
them underground, producing a rotted, yet edible
delicacy. The Chinese buried eggs; Islandic communities
interred shark meat in the sand; Scandinavians fermented
fish in the ground, along with cheese and a traditional
liquor; the Scottish buried kegs of butter in peat
bogs, slowly fermenting it for seven years before
eating it; the Inuit people still bury whale and
seagull meat.
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In the Pacific Islands, where a
warm, humid climate causes rapid food spoilage,
native communities have preserved fruit in fermentation
pits for two millennia. The chambers are dug in
well-drained locations and lined with banana leaves
as a protective barrier against the soil. The
pits were especially useful for accruing surplus
food for ceremonies and natural catastrophes.
If a hurricane were to take down a community’s
fruit trees, local people would quickly harvest
and store the fruit to prevent spoilage. So important
were storage pits in Fiji that before a man could
propose to a woman, her parents would inspect
his storage pits to make sure he was good marriage
material.
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Cucumber
pickle factories usually ferment cucumbers in
large outdoor vats of salt brine. Surprisingly,
these vats have no cover, and are wide open to
falling bird droppings, insects, and other airborne
objects. But according to Jim Cook, a food scientist
with the Minnesota-based pickle manufacturer Gedney,
tanks are left open for an important reason: The
sun’s ultraviolet and infrared rays prevent
yeast and mold growth on the brine surface—potentially
a much more serious problem than bird droppings.
In fact, Cook recommends that home picklers leave
their fermenting pickles in the sun to prevent
the spread of these microorganisms.
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Many people consider pickle brine a useful commodity,
with its complex flavor of spices, salt, vinegar,
and pickled vegetables. It’s been used as a
soup stock, a hangover remedy, a drink, and—for
many eastern European women—a cosmetic. There
are even reports of some American roller-skating
rinks selling pickle-brine snow cones.
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Pickling vegetables not only
improves their flavor, it can also make them more
nutritious and easier to digest. During fermentation,
bacteria produce vitamins as they digest vegetable
matter. Also, if the salting causes a vegetable
to lose water, the fat-soluble vitamins will become
more concentrated. According to Korean scientists,
kimchi (a traditional pickled
cabbage dish in Korea)
contains as much as double
the levels of vitamins B
1
, B
2
,
B
12
, and niacin as unfermented cabbage
contains.
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Fermentation can also transform inedible—even
poisonous—foods into delicious, healthful ones.
Many communities across Africa and South America
wash, grind, and ferment the toxic, cyanide-containing
cassava tuber to produce flour. Neolithic peoples
in Europe fermented nettles, cardoons, and new growths
of willow trees to make sour soups.
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