"bread and butter pickles" news and stories

Photo: Dvortygirl/Flickr

In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.

When my mother, who had been raised on kosher half-sour pickles, first tried bread-and-butters, she was immediately overwhelmed. For someone who was used to the tart flavor of Northeastern dills and half-sours, the Southern sweetness of the bread-and-butters were an absolute delight.

Through a combination of compliments and guile, she managed to get hold of our friend Millie's recipe. From that year on, we had a huge picklefest every summer, when we'd spend two or three days putting up bread-and-butter pickles.

While these are extremely sweet pickles, I have kept the recipe almost exactly the way my mom made it. This is partly due to the necessities of pickling, and partially due to a sense of tradition. Mostly, though, it's due to the fact that I regularly swap these pickles out for gherkins or sweet pickle relish.

Get the recipe for bread-and-butter pickles after the jump.

After reading that title, you might be wondering what unifying force could be bringing pickles, barbecue sauce and plum jam together under the same heading. The thing they have in common is that they are all made by the folks at We Love Jam, the same artisan producers who made the Blenheim apricot jam I wrote about last month.

It might seem a little incongruous that a company that includes jam in their name is making items that do not qualify as a fruit preserve. However now that I've had a taste of some of these other products, I'm thrilled that they decided to branch out. The world needs more companies that make food the way that they do, with care, attention to detail and a whole lot of quality ingredients. In addition to their amazing apricot love-in-a-jar, they also produce a spicy deep purple Mariposa jam, a tangy, kicky barbecue sauce and some balanced, crisp bread and butter pickles.

Of these three products, I have to spend a little time telling you how good this barbecue sauce is. When I was in high school, my dad had a friend who made barbecue sauce from his father's recipe. It had depth, with a perfect balance of sweet and spice. My father was such a big fan of Mr. Brown's sauce that he actually made a small investment in the company, primarily so that he could get his hands on a plenitude of the sauce. Such easy access to Mr. Brown's sauce ruined me for commercial sauces and I haven't found anything that lived up until this sauce from We Love Jam appeared in my life. I now look for excuses to eat it, slathering it on roasted chicken and making a small pool of it on the side of a plate of scrambled eggs. It's going to be a sad day when that little jar is empty.