Dill Pickles

Illustration by Nik Garvoille

NONFICTION ESSAY

Unbeknownst to most of you I am quite the connoisseur. I have always wanted to be one of those singular animals, a connoisseur, and correspondingly to spell the word correctly on the first try. Connoisseur. The word being French probably explains my difficulty spelling it, endowed, as is every French word, with anti-English perversion. But to note the English have no equivalent word for connoisseur whether for cigars, shotguns, whisky or old barns. To immediately see why nice people choose at some point in their lives to become connoisseurs, in my case a connoisseur of pickles. I think this might be achievable in a lifetime, to become a connoisseur of pickles, with less competition and expense than for wine and whisky.

The path to true connoisseurship is fraught with frauds, chocolate to name one. Not that I pretend to be a connoisseur of chocolate, this I leave to others, but to realize if you peak your appreciation at milk chocolate you are not well-versed of what wantonness chocolate is capable. Especially when chocolatiers turn as the locale from Star Wars describes, to the dark side. Here, at dark chocolate, is the first lesson of true connoisseurship, a degree of pain is involved, same goes for whisky and shotguns. Connoisseurship then is a decidedly adult orientation. There is in the act of chocolate an element that will make a child cry and will roll back the eyes of a connoisseur, however the heck you spell it.

I believe most good things in life come attached with the potential for connoisseuring. To cite one overlooked category, fried potatoes. My prejudice is that most people do not know how to properly fry potatoes. My grandfather, who was quite the connoisseur, did not believe apple pie could be nicely done without corncobs. Meaning the stove…no maple, no birch, no cedar shingles, for great apple pie it had to be corncobs. Accordingly my grandfather was a connoisseur of the ordinary, and soon attached to other things, like sauerkraut, potato salad, mashed potatoes, a proper bacon, lettuce and tomato. My personal sense is a good BLT cannot be eaten in polite public.

The subject here is pickles, the connoisseurship of pickles and to prevent the subject from spreading, restrict ourselves to dill pickles. I do not know if there is presently in the geographic realm of Wisconsin a dill pickle orthodoxy as there is for wine, beer and cheese. If almost anything else you can think of that people eat, a festival is engendered around it: lutefisk, sauerbraten, venison, mustard, never mind the overt emphasis on beer, wine and cheese. The problem is you can only sample so many lutefisk as knocks the edge off, whereas one can at least pretend to taste the subtleties of beer or wine.

To my personal taste a dill pickle presents a direct physical assault to the taste buds, like good chocolate a good dill pickle will cause small children to cry. How remarkable it is that some of the food adults enjoy cause small children to cry and adolescents to wince, but adulthood is like that.

My most favorite site to sample the full range of dill pickles is the ubiquitous church supper. A standard church basement where the womenfolk are raising money to pay off a roof repair. The menu is a norm of chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, some sort Jell-O, dinner rolls and a choice of pie. The New Testament refers to the lamb as the sacrificial animal of Christendom – they are wrong, it is the chicken. It’s not that I wouldn’t contribute to the building fund raised by a brisket barbecue or a pulled pork sandwich but that’s just not the way true charity is done. Mostly we pick on the Leghorn hen except for an anomaly of among Nordic Lutherans and their self-destructive lutefisk.

Standard to every church supper table is an inconspicuous dish of dill pickles. Accordingly the pickles have been sliced into quarters to make the initial 20 quarts go further; knowing very well there are people like me attending who are dill pickle connoisseurs. I generally try to find an uncomfortable corner of the cellar, near a draft, near noisy children or the garbage can, so to have more pickles to myself. Like as not the entire dish, if not several others. It is a common practice of church suppers to mix the dill pickles to avoid one bad jar from spoiling the event.

A dill pickle has a Richter Scale rating the same as earthquakes. A really good dill pushes category seven, a mediocre dill in the three to four range and a dill to write home about is upwards of nine. The first thing a good dill does is apply a half-Nelson wrestling hold somewhere behind your right ear. Others cite different body spasms, an involuntary twist to the upper spine, some persons with arthritis and joint pain should not attempt really good dill pickles. And we are not yet at the second tier sensation which occurs moments later as the front of your skull heats involuntarily, never mind the church basement is a tad cool. My observation is that females do not care for good dill pickles the same as males because a good pickle pretty much duplicates the menopausal hot flash in both onset and duration. Males for their part think this sensation is fun; the sexes kinda work this way sometimes.

Not every dill delivers the same degree of satisfaction, some are quite tame while others equally innocuous exert a torque to the upper spine that can be measured in foot-pounds. For the unprepared, maiming is a real possibility. Generally dill pickles like this are not available commercially. An FDA-approved pickle can never approach the Richter event found at a church supper, and corporate lawyers know why.

Mrs. Olive Gilman was our next-door neighbor, wife of Guy, she died of cancer in 1957. Mrs. Olive Gilman made the best dill pickles on the right hand side of the Milky Way Galaxy. Pickles so good that Catholics used to come to the chicken and biscuit supper served at Liberty Corners kirk just to sample those dills despite they were Protestant pickles. The recipe died with Mrs. Olive…except for one intact jar I found years later in the junk pile in the woods behind their house. No pickles but there were two inches of dill pickle juice, Mrs. Olive Gilman’s dill pickle juice. This holy relic is now stored at the local community club on a shelf on the west wall. A votive candle is beside it. This small shrine dedicated to Mrs. Olive Gilman and what may be the sole chemical descendant to her dill pickle recipe, Richter scale nine.