Bread and Butter (pickles)

My grandfather loved bread-and-butter pickles. I don’t know why I remember that; more notable among his favorite foods were bacon and eggs, pot roast, and pumpkin pie. Yet for some reason, I have a clear vision of my grandparents’ kitchen, with its quintessential 70s wallpaper and dark cabinets, and my grandfather at the table, explaining to me the difference between bread-and-butter (to be eaten with butter sandwiches) and dill pickles.

My grandpa was a gentle man, quiet in comparison to Grandma’s fiery personality. He liked to listen to Michigan State football and the Detroit Tigers on the radio with his friend Dal. The memory of his round face, water-blue eyes, and soft old-man sweaters will always make me smile, and wonder how we would have known each other if he had lived into my adulthood.

I like to think of these as a call to a less hectic time. A time in my life when conversations with Grandpa could occupy as much attention as any book I read or any lesson in school. I suppose I hope to regain that sense of connecting to that present tense, another reason that I gravitate to homemade…

Bread-and-butter pickles

For my grandpa, these basic bread-and-butter pickles (recipe again, from Fanny Farmer Cook Book).

As my second pickle experiment (more successful than the first!), this yielded 3 pints.

• 6 c thinly sliced pickling cucumbers
• 1 onion, sliced
• 1 shredded green pepper
• 1/4 c pickling salt
• 2 c brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp turmeric
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tbsp mustard seed
• 1 tsp celery seed
• 2 c cider vinegar

Mix the vegetables and salt. Cover and let stand for 3 hours. Mix remaining ingredients in a large pot, bring slowly to the boiling point and boil for 5 min. Drain vegetables and rinse well with cold water. Add them to the hot syrup and heat to just below boiling point. Spoon vegetables into hot, sterilized pint jars and fill with cooking syrup, leaving 1/8″ headroom. Seal the jars.

Again, they can be processed in a hot water bath for 10 minutes, but I chose not to process.

What I learned for next time

I used the Cuisinart to shred the pepper… This looked weird, and I have yet to taste, but I think “shred” may mean “thin slice by hand.” We’ll see how they taste…