Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here, and Jerry's here, and Dates here. It's here, it everybody, and it's time to munch and chow down on the short stuff. About pickles, well, the greatest things ever invented.
We've talked about this before. I know it makes me weird. I don't like pickles.
Does it make you weird? I just feel sad for you.
I mean, I think most people love pickles. I have found some support in my family, my brother's son, my nephew are Noah nephew. I was about to call my cousin because now he's a grown adult, it feels weird to call my nephew. But yeah, Noah is married now to his great wife Ellie, and they are having a baby. And Ellie hates pickles just like me. Wow, And Ellie.
Like there's a stereotype of pregnant people wanting pickles and ice cream.
That's true. I actually I should check back with her to see how that's going. And also Ellie is equally annoyed as I am with this other fact, which is pickles are so ubiquitous on like a sandwich platter or a burger platter or whatever that they don't even tell you on the menu that they're gonna throw a big stinky pickle spear on your plate to let that juice infect like six of your French fries that you then can't eat pickles. I tell people at restaurants, it's like
they're pickles, yeah, but they're on the side. I was like, please, do not even include them on my plate because that juice will infect either part of my hamburger bun or like five or six French fries. And then I was like, cheese, dude, get a life.
And they say, you want me to hold the pickles, and you say, I want you to take the pickles and hold them between your knees.
Oh great reference.
So let's talk about pickles, chuck, not just how much you dislike them or how much I love them, but where they came from in the first place.
That's right. They have been around for a very very long long time. Twenty thirty BCE is when people started transporting cucumbers across Mesopotamia. And that is like, as we've learned over the years, like a lot of foods that we have now are variations on other foods that receive that variation because they were trying to preserve it or transport it somewhere else.
Yeah, those cucumbers, So it's in dispute. Our friends at Mental Floss pointed out that it's possible that what they were talking about were snake melons that later people transcribed or translated into cucumber, but that it wasn't actually cucumber. So we're not exactly sure when cucumbers hit the scene, but they did come out of the Mesopotamian area the Middle East. We do know that they probably hit Europe in the early medieval era, and we know that pickles
came before cucumbers. People were pickling things as far back as nine thousand years ago, according to ancient texts from China. They just weren't pickling cucumbers. They're pickling fish, they're pickling pigs heads, they were pickling the heads of their enemy, anything you could pickle. They were pickling their livers, yes, definitely, but they just weren't pickling cucumbers yet.
Yeah, and that's generally what we're talking about here, to be clear, is the we know you can pickle all kinds of things, but you know, the old pickle that's on the plate that ruins the French fries. It either came from the Dutch word peckle p e k e l or the German perkle p o umlaut. I'm sorry, that's not an umloud. I wonder if that's a mistake.
Pukel. It's gotta be puckle with an umlaut.
Yeah, but it's a it's a little what do you call that accent in French?
I think somebody fat fingered that one.
I think so, because I've never seen that in German. So I'm gonna say it's supposed to be an umlaut p o k e l, which means salt or brine. And they use to be in the Victorian In Victorian England, you know, pickles was something that you ate if you had a lot of money, and they also served them. They would pickle them in the house and then serve them or store them rather and what's called the pickle cast or c a sto r, which is they would just kind of keep it as a centerpiece on the table.
And if you look up like an antique pickle cast or, they're they're cool, they're beautiful. I don't know if you saw any pictures I did. They look like sort of.
Like a.
Like a like a an oil lamp, almost like a really ornate oil lamp.
Yeah, you know what. I likened it too. It occurred to me remember those old straw holders, glass cylinder straw holders. You'd pull the top and all the straws came up with it and you just pull one out. Yeah, that cylinder. It reminded me of that. But you would have pickles instead of straws.
And with and with like a handle, like an oil lamp handle.
Yeah.
All the ones I saw had handles at least, right.
And you said that the pickle caster was associated with wealth, and definitely was. But I saw on a site called Back to the Past Collectibles they posted about pickle casters and the way they said it. Pickles themselves were typically associated with rural areas. So if you were an urban, wealthy person and you had a pickle caster, you're saying, I love pickles. Obviously I'm not making them myself, but I have staff and servants that are making it for me.
Check out all of my pickles. That's how rich I am. So it's weird that it was a country thing but in the city it was a wealth kind of thing.
Yeah, and I think that fancy cast or display had a lot to do with that, definitely. But yeah, for sure rule because you know people that farmed their own stuff and canned and preserve their own things and still do that kind of stuff. And you know, I've told stories about my mom dragging me to the cannery when I was a kid. Of course, that's the people that are doing it themselves exactly.
You know who loved to pickle back then, the word.
R as far as commercial pickles that you can buy, like when they became a little more ubiquitous and affordable HJ. Hines What I was about to say, canned up, but they were probably jarred originally. In eighteen sixty is the
first sort of widely available commercial pickled product. Yeah, And in eighteen ninety three there was this giveaway of a little pickle pendant at the World's Fair that year that was apparently so popular it has gone down in history as like one of the most popular marketing plays ever.
Yeah. I read about it in Atlas Obscura and they said that the Hines booth was hidden on like the second floor somewhere, and so Hines started giving out flyers saying come get your your free memento. And it was just such a hit. Everybody wanted a free pickle for some reason, not even a real pickle, a little plastic pickle, said Hines, a hunt that they were wor that the floor was going to give because so many people just swamped that place for so long. So yeah, it was
a really big deal. It put Hines on the map like it as a household word.
Yeah, we said plastic at that thing had to be metal, right.
No, it was a I can't remember what they called it, but it was like a proto plastic. Oh wow, crumbly, weird looking. It looked like it was whittled from wood. Not a pretty pickle at all. But Rubell had to have it and they'd attach it to like their watch chain or something like that and be like, oh, this this is my Hindz pickle chotchkey that I got at the eighteen ninety three World's Fair.
I think it's a great time for a break. Okay, right, we'll be right back with a chotchkey joke. All right, as promise we're back, and I promise you a chochke joke. And when I was in Mexico City. We went to the Leon Trotzky's house as part of the fried Calo Casa Azul tour.
I have a feeling I know where this is going.
You know right where it's going, because my friend Tommy and the gifts in the gift shop said look at all these Trotzky chochkeys, and that became a fun thing that we said all weekend. Oh, I bet We said that a lot, and we said one more margarita a lot.
Yeah, I bet so.
Pickles. H. J. Hines in eighteen sixty did his thing. Klausen came around ten years later in eighteen seventy, Mount Olive in nineteen twenty six, and the old stork with the lastic pickle is the relative newcomer on the block didn't start until nineteen forty two.
Yeah, the stork who spoke like Graucho Marx. For some weird reason, it's.
Because Groucho Marx was the hottest thing going back then.
I guess. So if you do, if you want to make pickles, I've made pickles before, and I love making pickles. It's like one of the like most verger things you can do in your kitchen. No matter where you are, and it's very very easy, depending on what kind of pickle you want to make.
What are you doing.
I'm making salt brine pickles, which is called lacto fermenting, because what you're doing is creating a brine that actually encourages the growth of beneficial probiotic bacteria and they go to town eating the sugars in the cucumbers and thus preserving it, but at the same time putting out lactic acid, which prevents like dangerous bacteria from growing in your pickle brine. As long as your pickles are under the surface of the brine, and they make little glass discs to weigh
them down, it's really neat. Then you can it's basically put the thing in the fridge and leave it for I think a few weeks, thirty days I think was the was the minimum, and pull them out and you have these strange tasting pickles. They don't taste like the pickles you're normally used to because it's it's a different way to make them than the stuff you buy off the shelf at the grocery store.
All right, So that's the salt.
Brine, Yes, salt brine or lactose fermented.
All right, You've also got your classic dill. You're gonna use white vinegar for those. And then all of these, generally except for your salt brining method, have some kind of vinegar, usually white vinegar. And then the spices are where that particular variety of pickle get gets its flavor.
So in the case of a dill, you're gonna have mustard seed, You're gonna have a dill obviously, hopefully some fresh and some dried dill, that white vinegar, some white sugar, salt obviously, and I think that's it, right, Yeah.
I mean, you can get really creative with pickles. You can make them hot, you can make them garlic, you can add whatever you want. But the basically the split between different types of pickles whether you use a vinegar brian or a salt brine, and the vinegar brine doesn't allow for beneficial bacteria to grow, so it's not a probiotic like lacto fermented pickles or kimchi or sauer kraut, those are all salt brine. But the vinegar brian pickles
still have health benefits. They found that it actually reduces or steadies your blood sugar and it can last for a while. It's not just like you're eating the pickle and your blood sugar's okay, and then you finish the pickle and it goes crazy. It has like a lasting effect from vinegar. So no matter what kind of pickles you're eating, you're getting some kind of benefit from it.
All right, Well, you also get your bread and butter pickle. That's the one out of any pickle that sounds the most appetizing to me, even though I think the name of this episode will be pickles. Colon how to ruin a good cucumber?
Because I love a cukee oh, I feel the exact opposite. I'm like, get that disgusting thing out of my face and listen.
What you don't like cucumbers? No, man, I love a cuke.
No. It's like, how can something be tasteless and taste disgusting at the same time. It's a mystery. Wow, I can't stand cucumbers. Maybe a cucumber of water if it's got lemon or basil or something in it, but they better not be actual cucumbers floating around in it.
Wow. Okay, yeah, all right, you ever try it with just a little pinch of sea salt.
Yes, they're gross.
You don't like them in a salad.
I don't like cucumbers at all.
That is remarkable, unless.
Again, if they're pickled, I love them.
You hate cucumbers and love pickles. I love cucumbers and hate pickles.
We are yining yang for nothing, chuck, Well, maybe.
That's why we work. So the bread and buck bucker. The bread and butter is the white vinegar, salt, white sugar. I think more white sugar than the dill. And then you've got some celery seed, some turmeric, some garlic, some onion, and some red chili flakes.
Yeah, there's loads of sugar and bread and butter. Because the two flavor profiles are sweet and tangy. It's a strange combination. But if you're in the mood for it, a good bread and butter pickle is pretty good.
And apparently the tradition ruining your sandwich platter or even worse when they if they wrap up a pickle and a sandwich wrapper to go like beside the sandwich, unforgivable.
I don't know what you're talking about, you know, if you like, just like I know what you're saying. I don't understand how it's unforgivable. It makes no sense because pickles are so great.
That started in New York delis, specifically Jewish delis. Jewish immigrants started in the nineteen thirties offering dill pickles as a palate cleanser. Yeah, because that acid helps contrast with that. You know, maybe that fatty meat sandwich you're eating and it's got a nice little crunch to it. I do like a crunch. But that's why I look cucumbers. They crunch. I didn't think pickles. I thought they were less crunchy because they're soaked in garbage.
No, that's the wrong count. You're so if you have non crunchy pickles and you're buying them off the shelf, they were baked or they were cooked essentially boiled in a water bath. That doesn't actually boil, but it kills off any beneficial bacteria that might have been in it because it kills it with temperature, and it also makes the pickles themselves flimsy. If you have lacto fermented salt
Brian pickles, there's your crunchy pickle. And those can be done with little enough salt that you get what's called a half sour, and it tastes much more like a cucumber than a normal pickle does. So I think you should try a half sour.
Yeah, still pickle, you know what, I'm gonna try one because do those have vinegar at all?
No? They're salt brine as far as I know.
All right, maybe I should try that because the vinegar. You know, I'm on record is the vinegar is part of the problem. I don't like a lot of like white vinegars. Yeah, and like apple cider vinegar is pretty rough. I do like balsamic vinegars and things like that. It's very specific. I'm You're very complex and I'm picky.
Is that it?
And that's it? And I just want to good Lord, get real at the end.
Is that how we're going to end the episode?
Yeah, Chuck is needy and picky.
All right, Well, then short stuff is out.
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