Dave Wood

Our garden is now flourishing with cucumbers in numbers that would make the heirs of Mr. Gedney blush with shame, and our sand patch on Walnut Street swells with pride.

In all due humility I’m sharing a recipe for a pickle called “Kosher Half Dill,” given to me when I wrote a story about TV producer Russell Morash (“Cooking with Julia Child”) and his wife Marian. They’re Jewish folks of the New York persuasion visiting Minneapolis to present a Victory Garden award to one of their Minneapolis fans.

When I told her of my adoration for Kosher half dills and the impossibility to find any authentic versions in the refrigerator cases in the entire Twin Cities area, she handed me her new book, “The Victory Garden Cook Book,” Alfred Knopf, 1982.) “Try my recipe,” she said. “It’s on page 100 and it couldn’t be simpler.”

Turns out Marian wasn’t just whistling the Torah. My first try came out perfectly crispy, garlicky, and not too salty. I’ve been using it for 44 years now. If you don’t care for refrigerator pickles, you best stop reading right now!

You can make them by the quart or by the Jeroboam, the oil tanker or whatever fits your kitchen space and appetite.

Here’s the material for a quart:

Stuff a sterilized wide mouth quart jar with the following:

12 4-5 inch cukes (the kind with “warts”)

1 large whole bulb of garlic separated into cloves and smashed with a kitchen hammer. Remove papery skins

6-8 sprigs of fresh dill (use a pinch of dried dill seed in a pinch)

¼ tsp. pickling spice

Set filled jar aside, then mix the brine in a saucepot:

one cup of kosher salt (NO MORE!)

¼ cup distilled white vinegar

2 ½ qts. water

Pour boiling brine into jar until it is 1 inch above highest cucumber. Weight jar top with heavy cup. Store overnight. Save leftover brine for next time. Screw cover on jar and store in fridge. Keeps for six weeks; you’ll have more than you need for one quart of pickles.

Rescued by Aunt Irene

We’ll now travel halfway across this great land of ours from New York City to Faribault, Minn. to visit Ruth’s Aunt Irene. Well, not her but her church cookbook to dig up a much-loved sweet pickle recipe. 

Aunt Irene died several years ago but had lived long enough to attain the cooking skills of her mother, Wilhelmina Pirsig, winner of countless Minnesota Fair blue ribbons. Comparison between Marian Morish and Irene is as different as you might expect. Marian was cosmopolite, down-to-earth and humorous; Irene was a rural schoolteacher, rather stern at times. She probably would shy away from starring on a network TV show as Marian did back in the 1980s.  But when summer rolled around Irene seemed always in a pickle. We’re happy to report she left several recipes in various church cookbooks and newspaper clippings.

Here’s a recipe for Irene’s sweet refrigerator pickles, evocative of her stern and terse manner of expression:

2 cups distilled white vinegar

1 cup VERY, VERY thinly sliced cucumbers

1 cup VERY, VERY thinly sliced onion

1 chopped green bell pepper

1 pinch pickling spice

 2 quarts boiled water

ASSEMBLY: pack into sterilized pint Mason jars.

“Boil sugar, vinegar, pickling spice, until sugar is completely dissolved. Pour hot brine over jarred cucumbers. Seal and refrigerate. Keeps for long time.”

Ruth and I have celebrated Irene’s memory with jar after jar of her concoction because it goes perfectly with church supper hotdish and funeral ham sandwiches.

This summer, I experimented with a batch. I substituted a jalapeno pepper for Irene’s green pepper. I guess you might say I Marianized it to good effect. (if you have a RED jalapeno, you can further Marianize it by chopping it up and tossing it in to perk up the color.) If any of you readers out there ever run into Irene Up There, please don’t tell her about this modest experiment. She might think it’s too devilishly hot!