"pickling" news and stories

Add a sweet tang to your dishes with homemade preserved lemons.

Happy National Pickle Day! Though most commonly perceived and popularized as a brined cucumber, the "Food Lover's Companion" defines the pickle as any "food that has been preserved in a seasoned brine or vinegar mixture." According to the guide, the most popular pickling subjects beyond the cucumber typically include pearl onions, cauliflower, watermelon rind, baby corn, herring and pig's feet -- though most any vegetable can be pickled, it need only be firm enough to not dissolve in brine.

Brines range from sweet (Bread-and-Butter Pickles), to sour or hot (Spicy Dill Pickles), or may take on the flavor of whatever additives, from herbs to spices (Rosemary-Garlic Pickles). And the brine itself holds a range of uses too: soup stock, drink base, even hangover remedy! In one of the more surprising uses, a shot of pickle juice follows a shot of Jameson in the "pickle back" drink.

For an unexpected range of recipes, check out ilovepickles.org and get creative!

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot at having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Photo: you can count on me, Flickr.

National Pickle Day may yet be a couple of months away, but now's the time to start perfecting your technique, as did Flickr user "You Can Count on Me." Though the pickles themselves aren't even pictured, their zingy brine looks promising, with masses of fiery floating peppercorns and sprigs of dill.

Treasured for their tangy flavor alone, pickles boast both a historic background and surprising health benefits. Vitamin-C rich pickles were packed on Christopher Columbus's fateful voyage to help the seamen fight scurvy -- and actually take their name from the ship's stocker, Amerigo Vespucci. Today, the fermented fruits are considered extra nutritious for allowing bacteria the time to create additional vitamins and are in fact more easily digested than their non-treated counterparts. So get pickling!

Check out more pickle trivia at the Science of Pickles and try the pictured recipe from blog Everybody Likes Sandwiches.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot at having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Grown-up sodas. Image: Details.

A few of the best stories spied elsewhere on the Web this week:

BoingBoing picks up The Economist's story (and awesome graphic): "How many minutes do people in your city have to work to buy a Big Mac?"

Adult sodas from the stylish fellas at Details.

Starbucks-lovers, alert! They are lowering prices on some drinks but kicking them up a notch on others.

The L.A. Times reports: Facebook has created "Restaurant City." You may never get work done again.

Another ephemerally gorgeous piece from Design*Sponge's "In The Kitchen With" column, featuring a meringue-raspberry ice cream cake and some enviable dishware.

Portland, Oregon continues to rule, with a Fermentation Fest on Thursday of next week. (Clearly either our invite was lost in the mail, or they do not know about our pickling problems.)

Have you sampled the blackberries in the market right now? They are super-sweet. This Blackberry-Cabernet Caipirinha from Chow had us drooling.

The best Bruni interview of the bunch -- from the New Yorker.

Take pity on a Yankee girl, wouldja? I thought I was being all clever about the head when I put up a batch of watermelon rind pickle and another of rind preserves during my pickling vacation* this past August. Thing is, when I recently popped open a jar for a pre-dinner relish tray, my North Carolinian husband asked me if we had any Cheez Whiz in the fridge. Huh?

It seems that in his youth, Douglas' grandmother Memama's very best girlfriend Janie, upon hearing word of his arrival in Plymouth, would pull down a Ball jar, and show up chez Memama with a platter of watermelon rind pickle, Cheez Whiz and Captain's Wafers. The best I could do this past Sunday night was accompany the pickle with some double-cream brie and store brand Ritz-ish crackers that we had on hand. Oh, he swore up and down that it was just perfect, but he's all polite like that.

So, what I'm wondering now is if any of you have a particular familiarity with watermelon rind pickles, and if so -- if I bring along a jar to Thanksgiving dinner, should I tote along the Whiz & wafers, or was that strictly a Janie thing? Might plain ol' crackers suffice, is there another standard methodology, or should we all just stop fretting and enjoy?