the crock covered with a square of cheesecloth or a heavy lid? Did she leave the stem ends of the cukes intact, as we’d read in some recipes, and shave off a bit from the blossom end? Or include a grape leaf for extra crunch? The memory was mostly about sneaking the pickle, not making it.
Our first try was a salty disaster. Another batch seemed to hold some promise but then suddenly turned to mush. Ultimately, after reading dozens of variations on fermenting cucumbers in a crock, we realized we were following steps to make a finished pickle when what we really wanted was something more immediate and clandestine, something forbidden: a pickle that would make our hearts pound as we reached for it.
So we’ve spent the summer in a pickle, as it were, trying to recapture a pair of lost recipes: the salty crunch of Cioci’s half-sours and the compact zing of Gram’s little cornichons. The tricky part was that each of us was trying to recapture not just a pickle but a pickled memory. The challenge was how to add to the crock the thrill of sneaking a bite, or stir in the damp, earthy smell of a dirt-floor cellar. Vivid yet elusive, the pickles are no longer preserved in vinegar or salt, but float somewhere in the briny depths between our taste buds and a sleepy neuron dozing quietly in some dusty corner of the brain. Neuroscientists can now tell us that the dusty corner is likely to be somewhere in the hippocampus or amygdala, the parts of the brain that maintain emotions and long-term memory. Whereas all of our other senses travel through different regions of the brain, taste and smell shoot directly to memory.
We persisted. Taste, memory, and emotion seemed to combine with increasing intensity at every bite. Dinner conversations became sassy as each meal was accompanied by a potentially Proustian pickle. We evaluated the nuance and complexity of each new batch as if it were a fine wine. “Initially quite sour, this pickle opens slowly to reveal salty, earthy undertones,” one of us might sputter. Or, “A bit plump, but seductive, with a long, steely finish. Impressive nose, peppery, it promises to taste even better in three months.” For as long as the garden kept pumping out cucumbers (a brief but precious few weeks here in New England), we became students of the briny, the bitter, and all things biting. We spent hours discerning taut from crisp, and crisp from crunchy, or debating the subtle differences between tart and tangy.
Sour, it turns out, has a split personality. There’s the good sour, the one that adds perk and pizzazz to our otherwise bland diet. And then there is sour’s evil twin, the one that spoils our food. We refer to bad feelings as sour grapes, and yet we intentionally make other fruits and veggies sour. In fact, we deliberately make any number of foods sour, pickling pig’s feet, flower buds, or hard-boiled eggs. Not even the little herring can escape our passion for pucker. Sour milk in the carton is something you don’t want to pour into your morning coffee or tea, but how sad the baked potato would become without its luscious slather of sour cream. And home bakers have long practiced the art of clabbering, or souring the milk in a recipe on purpose, to produce a tart flavor and ensure a tender crumb. Whenever she made doughnuts, Gram always soured the milk. Coincidentally, Cioci performed a similar bit of alchemy when she whisked cream into her vinegary beet soup, creating a shockingly pink and velvety borscht. Sour, when we’re on its good side, can perform miracles. The pickle, for example: cucumber, plus vinegar, plus salt and spice, somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
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