From Homeland to New York, Pickles Keep Culture Alive

The produce inside the 72nd Street Fairway market in Manhattan never changes. Cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes fill the vegetable aisle, and the smell of strawberries and fresh herbs waft through the air. Once thought of as summer treats, these fresh vegetables are available to New Yorkers year-round courtesy of food corporations that ship food to wherever it is wanted from wherever it is in season.

In the face of such bounty, the traditional method of preserving local, seasonal vegetables through the winter – pickling – seems nearly obsolete. In New York City, why go to the trouble of jarring cucumbers? And furthermore, in an age where much food is pre-packaged and ready-to-microwave, who even knows how to make a pickle?

But driven by the local food movement, pickling is making a comeback - at home, in pickling classes offered around the city and at locally-conscious restaurants.

Heritage

Executive chef Matt Weingarten calls his wife's hometown of Litmanova, Slovakia, "a place lost in time."  Villagers from this town near the Polish border drink sauerkraut juice - not orange juice - for Vitamin C during winter months. Oranges must be shipped to Litmanova, while sauerkraut, made from fermented local cabbage, is cheap, readily available and traditional.

In fact, like sauerkraut in Eastern Europe, most cultures have their own pickles, and pickles such as Korean kimchi or Indian green mango pickles, are often emblematic of a culture’s cuisine. For decades, immigrants have carried their cuisines’ defining pickles to New York, where their culinary traditions continue, reminding new Americans of their old homes. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan wrote, “the immigrant's refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation." <Click here for an interactive graphic on Pickles of the World>

But in two or three generations, this knowledge is lost. CityPicklers.com interviewed 20 Indian and Pakistani immigrants on the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens, and while nearly everyone remembered homemade green mango pickles, only a handful of first-generation immigrants kept home-pickling alive, and no second-generation immigrants pickled at all.

According to fermentation expert Sandor Ellix Katz, the mere memory of homemade pickles lingers. “I meet lots of people, particularly old people, that have a memory – annual wine making, annual pickle making, sourdough they kept baking every week,” Katz said, noting that in many cases, immigrant grandparents do not pass the customs and traditions of the old world on to the next generation.

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