PICKLEGATE
The Best Pickle Predicament
by Duncan Murrell
The Independent Weekly
April 10, 2002
"Did she tell you he makes pickles?"
"So? Someone's got to."
-- from "Crossing Delancey"
LET ME GET this out of the way first: the best pickle in the Triangle can be purchased only at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill. It is not a canned pickle, or a bread-and-butter pickle, or a sweet pickle, or even a dill pickle full of vinegar. It does not come in a jar adorned with a picture of a stork or someone's grandmother. It does not say "Mt. Olive" on it. The best pickle in the Triangle doesn't even come from here; its place of origin contains a story we will get to later.
The best pickle in the Triangle is a new pickle, followed closely by a half-sour. These are brined pickles made from Kirby cucumbers harvested in New Jersey and transformed in cold storefronts and warehouses in the New York area. The cucumbers ferment until they are soured in large vats of brine seasoned with coriander, mustard seed, bay leaves, black peppercorns, red peppers and garlic. The new pickle spends the least amount of time in the vats ¯ maybe a day, maybe three days ¯ and still tastes something like a cucumber when it comes out, only saltier and more complicated. It's the ghost of a cucumber, a harvest food that retains both the freshness of new produce and a hint of the other side, where cucumbers are transformed completely into something dark and soft and unrecognizable.
A new pickle should be subtle and shouldn't make your mouth pucker. The new pickle's cousin, the half-sour, is a cucumber that's been in the vats a little longer. It's a less crispy than the new pickle, the taste of the coriander and mustard seed are more obvious, and it's more sour. Both pickles have to remain refrigerated after they've been made ¯ canning would kill them ¯ and so they're only good for a short time. These are the two pickles properly served alongside a deli sandwich in the best kosher delicatessens in New York. And they're a bitch to find around here.
I'm a fan of the new pickle, so my choice for best in the Triangle is a new pickle that they just started selling at A Southern Season. The label says it's a Guss's Pickle. The second best new pickle in the Triangle is also the only other new pickle I could find in the Triangle. It's the pickle sold at the Whole Foods stores, once known to us as Wellspring. The Chapel Hill store most consistently stocks this pickle, which is also called a Guss's Pickle.
Two Guss's pickles, two very different pickles ¯ the ones at A Southern Season are far less salty and present the spices with great clarity, while the Whole Foods pickles overpower the senses with salt. For me, an obsessive, this disparity begged the question: what's the deal with Guss's pickles?
It's at this point that my little project to pick the best pickle in the Triangle ran off the tracks and out of control.
I'VE BEEN EATING new pickles ¯ when I could get them ¯ ever since I went away to college in New York almost sixteen years ago. I'd always been a pickle guy, but eating my first new pickle (delivered to my dorm room with a corned beef on pumpernickel) changed my palate forever. I can only compare it to the first time I drank a wine not available at a convenience store: a moment that's both revelatory and embarrassing. After all these intervening years, I've come to know a little something about new pickles and half sours, thank God.
And I definitely know Guss's pickles. I've stood out on Essex Street in the lower East Side stuffing my face with Guss's pickles. I ate a Guss's pickle for the first time after a klezmer brunch at a lower East Side club called Tonic, located in an old kosher winery. During the show, the accordion player's instrument broke, and he went running out of the club to an accordion shop on Essex Street on the other side of Delancey, and was back on stage with a new accordion in about ten minutes. Some of us thought it was cool that someone could just run out and get an accordion when he needed it, so we went over to the accordion shop and thank the owner. And then it was just a few more steps to Guss's.
For more than ninety years they served pickles out of an open storefront on Essex Street once owned by Izzy Guss, a Russian immigrant who started in the pickle business when there were more than a hundred such businesses on the lower East Side. By virtue of luck, good location, a prominent role in the movie "Crossing Delancey," and hard work, by the 1990s Guss's was the last shop standing. And because of that, "Guss" means more than pickles now. It's an incantation used by adherents to a specific kind of American nostalgia: for tenement life, for grabbing your lunch on the fly on your way to work in the garment district, for eating kosher before kosher was cool, and for the experience of one of the most important, influential, and most thoroughly documented immigrant settlements ever in America, the Jewish Lower East Side.
Why a goy like me gets worked up about this subject, I don't know. My own immigrant story ¯ or rather, that of my ancestors ¯ is so shrouded in mystery and time, it's as good as lost. I grew up in a Maryland neighborhood that was primarily Catholic and Jewish, which is why I also pay attention to Papal encyclicals. I've taken on these cultures as my own, or at least as cultures I feel comfortable passing through. The Lower East Side means something to me.
It's all nostalgia, though. Does anyone really mourn the passing of the dangerously crowded tenement, the cold water flat, the pervasive poverty and disease? Nostalgia reorients everything and washes it clean. It can make you buy things: a new VW Beetle, a book about me maw on the porch snappin' beans and tellin' stories, and a dollar pickle at a gourmet store. "Guss" can invoke whole histories, sights and smells, people dead and gone, and therefore it can sell pickles.
"Guss" is greater than that shabby cold storefront on Essex Street, which is a good thing for some people because the shop (properly known as Essex Street Pickles, but nobody called it that) was evicted in December. "I had no choice," said landlord Mendel Guttman, reported in The New York Times. "The reason we put him out was strictly because he owes me a substantial amount of rent." The "him" in question is Tim Baker, who started working at Guss's in 1979 and bought the place twelve years ago. As far as anyone knows, Baker is one of only a handful of people who knows Guss's recipe, handed down from Guss through Baker's predecessor and mentor, Sol Kaplan. For a short period of time this winter Guss's was homeless, until the Lower East Side Tenement Museum stepped in and arranged to have him use their storefront at 97 Orchard Street. And so it goes: a real, honest-to-god pickle stand survives as a working museum piece.
Through it all ¯ the eviction and the temporary cessation of production -- the Guss's pickles kept arriving in the Triangle like clockwork. Funny. For a Triangle-area pickle eater, this poses some difficulties, chief among them the inescapable conclusion that nothing we've been eating around here is actually a Guss's pickle. This would explain why the Guss's pickles from two different Triangle stores taste so different, My obsessiveness led me to make a few more calls, which led me to this realization: pickle people smell Guss's blood in the water and they're maneuvering fast to cash in on the nostalgia market. The pickles themselves are an afterthought, vessels for the conveyance of cultural and brand identity. If they happen to taste good also, fine.
One friendly deli man at one of the local stores admitted with a wink that their Guss's pickles were really made by the company that used to supply Guss's cucumbers. "They looked at it and said, We can make pickles. So they just started calling them Guss's." The proprietor of an uptown pickle shop in Manhattan just flat-out lied to me: "Sorry to inform you Guss's pickles is no longer in business. I would love for you to try ours, promise you won't regret it." One of the distributors who stock shelves in the Triangle kept saying to me, idiotically, "they're straight from the Lower East Side," even as I tried to explain to him that was impossible.
United Pickles, one of the biggest and oldest kosher food companies in the United States and maker of 50 to 70 million pickles a year, has begun to market some of its wares as "Guss's Pickles" here in the Triangle. United Pickles was also started by Russian immigrants, and they also use a family recipe handed down generation after generation. But is there any hope that a Guss's pickle from United is made the way Izzy Guss would have made it? Probably not.
I realize all this makes me seem the kind of person who gets upset that there isn't a "Pepperidge Farm" or a "Little Debbie," or that Wendy never made an old-fashioned hamburger and that she didn't look like that anyway. That might have once been true about me, but I've since made my peace with the all-American idea of imaginary spokesmen and fictional product histories. But I still want to know where my food comes from. And when that food has the word "Guss" on it ¯ the name of a real Russian immigrant who invented a real recipe and made pickles until he died, who passed his recipe to a man who still makes those same damn pickles ¯ I want to know, not just believe, that it was a pickle made by Tim Baker and his employees on the Lower East Side, in a cold storefront filled with big red and black vats. And if it isn't such a pickle, I claim it's an insult to the dead.
This is all fast becoming a moot point, though. The pickles at A Southern Season are very good, no matter where they come from. You should eat them. The whole question of what is a Guss's pickle will soon be settled, too. Last week, United Pickles announced that it would be franchising Guss's Pickles stores throughout the New York metropolitan area, places where they'll serve pickles out of a barrel and try mightily to copy whatever it was that was unique about Guss's in the first place. Maybe someday we'll get our own store and we'll never again have to wonder where you can get the best pickle in the Triangle.
Guss's pickles will become, ipso facto, the pickles sold in those chain stores. They'll surely be standardized, the mustard and coriander and garlic meted out by the milligram. Maybe they'll wear funny hats and have slogans. Maybe they'll use a caricature of Izzy Guss as their logo, looking out from behind the barrels and forever surveying his little pickle world, one unlike anything he'd ever seen in his lifetime.
He'll never be forgotten now.
Copyright © 2002 Duncan Murrell
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