When November rolls around, the high garden season is truly over.
Whatever
embarrassment of riches we have enjoyed from our cucumber, tomato and
squash patches is now safely jarred as relish and pickles – or lies
discreetly in the compost pile.
You’d never think the history of
these condiments could have been exciting or even controversial, but it
was. The lowly pickle was not only an important player in immigrant
diets at the turn of the twentieth century, it was also the means to
solvency and entrepreneurship for many a new arrival. The Lower East
Side of New York City was the neighborhood where waves of new immigrants
settled.
Around the Civil War came the Germans, then the Irish,
escaping the horrors of the potato famine. Lithuanians, Latvians,
Poles, Hungarians, Italians and Russians crowded into what became, in
1900, the most heavily populated area in the country, with 2223 people
in one square block, a teaming mix of enterprising newcomers chasing the
American Dream. One of the easiest and best ways to get into some kind
of business was to operate a pickle cart. Or, for that matter, even a
basket. You needed almost no start up capital. The demand for product
was great. A cart could be rented for ten cents a day. Filled before
dawn with produce from the local markets or pickles made in tenement
kitchens, it was then wheeled profitably around the neighborhood. Unlike
the sweatshops, you could make your own hours, and most important for
Jewish peddlers, observe the Sabbath.
A pickle could be had for a
penny. It was a nutritious and quick snack for which people had real
affection-or in some views, addiction. In her wonderful culinary history
of a Lower East Side tenement, 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman describes the
variety and number of pickles to be had in the streets. Not only were
there cabbages pickled whole, eggplants, peppers, string beans and
beets, cucumbers sour, half sour and salted; even apples were pickled.
To
me, it sounds like pure bliss, but at the time, nervous social
reformers, politicians and xenophobes fixated on the immigrant diet and
were appalled. It was filled with too many highly spiced foods, which
made newcomers too excitable and unstable to be good Americans. A proper
diet should be bland, they preached: replace pickles and halvah with
applesauce and creamed potatoes! In the years ramping up to Prohibition,
there were even dieticians who labeled the pickle a dangerous
stimulant, like alcohol, tobacco or caffeine.
Then, in 1924, The
Johnson-Reed Act slowed immigration to a trickle, and American
attention was turned away from the immigrant’s plate. But in the way of
all good food, pickles made inroads and were assimilated. Today,
MacDonald’s automatically serves your burger with a pickle; and more
salsa is sold nationally than ketchup. Adventurous home picklers have
vats of sauerkraut and kim chee fermenting away in their cellars.
Next on my list are Moroccan preserved lemons and Iraqi pickled turnips.