A Pickle Obsession Unearthed

Please let this be the one

It's very difficult to find nice pickles, the nice sour kind, without any sugar or ones that aren't soaked in pure vinegar where I live. For some reason, all the little prickly cornichons here, the kind that are normally served with charcuterie platters, are steeped in sugar and so sour you just get an icky sugar laden sour taste when you eat them. They're not something to eat, they're something to slice a shaving from and combine with a bite of pâté. The whole idea of taking one, biting into it, and enjoying its complex and delicious combination of textures and flavors is lost here in France. As a consequence of the pickle condition here in Lyon, I crawl through back aisles of ethnic shops high and low for real pickles, the kind I love. Once I believe I have hit paydirt, the supply chain is usually broken and they stop carrying them. It's my luck. It's really hard to find the good kind around here.

So of course when David Lebovitz, a resident of Paris, food writer extraordinaire, did a batch of Arthur Schwartz's Home Made Kosher Dills at home and told us how easy it was the other day (recipe is on David's Site), I was instantly charmed. He did these pickles, and said: "...All that was missing was a pile of hot corned beef jammed between two spices of corn rye with some mustard and a Dr. Brown's black cherry soda." this made me want to immediately prepare a batch. I believe this may be the pickle I am looking for. I'm hoping, anyway. I divided the recipe he provided and did one jar. We'll see the final result soon. Thank you David!

While I have a few days to dream... I hope it is the kind of pickle I had that time in the former USSR. Loic took me to the city formerly known as Leningrad, St. Petersburg, Russia. I bumbled my way through an irretracable maze of subways and back streets to a market. Lo and behold, there were pickles stacked like mountains. Curious about Russian pickles, I bought one, tasted it, and my mind started turning circles. I just had to find myself a place to sit and meditate for a moment to get a grip on what I had just tasted. The woman with the honeycombs just stared when I sat next to her and threw my head back. It was the most excellent pickle I had ever had in my whole life.

This is the lady in St. Petersburg Russia and her pickles.
A piece of my soul was lost when I had to leave the pickles behind in Russia.

I immediately purchased some of each kind that were offered, and lugged a large dripping sack of them back to the place where we were staying. I stuffed pickles into my mouth one after the other like a pickle freak. The lady we were staying with told me to watch out, I risked becoming ill. She insisted that I keep them in her refrigerator. I guess they must have had a scare with some spoiled pickles in St. Petersburg but that didn't stop me from consuming them in large quantities. One night I even remember sneaking into the kitchen where she slept, all for the love of these pickles.

It was very very late, It must have been the wee hours of the morning. I slinked from our room through a first hallway where the boy, her son, was curled up in a sleigh bed next to his beloved computer, and then down another long hallway and around a corner past her husband, snorting and making puttering noises in a recliner in front of a fuzzy television screen. I opened the creaky door to the kitchen where a dim light from the tail end of the white night was filtering through lace curtains and barely lit the room. The kitchen was gray but my mind was dazzled with pickle green, because all I could think of were the pickles as they would be glowing by the refrigerator light. I made my way to the refrigerator and opened the door to get a pickle from my stash in the vegetable drawer. It made a clonking sound and she woke up. She gave me a pretty hard glare there in the almost dark kitchen and asked me what I was doing there. I said "to get... a pickle..." She huffed and turned her back to me and I snatched one of the pickled greens and scurried off into the night, nibbling and stuffing it systematically into my mouth as I went back to the bed.

Loic did not understand my love of these pickles. I really can't explain it myself except that there was a memory lodged deep in my subconscious, somewhere this flavor had wedged itself into the animal part of my brain and it clutched me like a vice. Soon the pickles were gone but that did not stop me from thinking about them.

One clue to the path to the pickles, dredged from the archive, a path never to be retraced again

If you have ever been lost in a Russian subway, you'll know how I felt when I tried to find my way back to that market. She resisted when I told her I planned to go back and get more of those pickles before we left Russia and take them home. I tried to get her son to take me back to the market, but he minded his mother. She had had enough of my obsession with the pickles already, they were keeping her up at night. She finally pleaded with me not to try and cross the border with pickles, as if they were illegal to import into France. I don't know, we were in a rush, I had all these other things on my list, and the seemingly illegal plan of packing up a big sack of pickles to carry home was cast aside. But it haunts me to this day. I must have those pickles again.