On pickles

In summer a few friends and I get together to make pickled cucumbers. In Melbourne there are very few good pickles. Store bought ones are usually preserved in vinegar and are too astringent. And those preserved only in brine are almost always imported—generally soggy and flaccid by the time they're opened. Our pickles are classic Kosher dills. The recipe we follow is my friend's Bubba's, who started making her own pickles after arriving in Australia from Poland, also to find a dearth of good pickles. It is simple: gherkins, a small handful of chopped garlic, a few decent sprigs of dill, salt water in a jar, left to ferment for five days. They come out crunchy, fragrant, moderately soured.

¶

We usually pickle sometime in January. We gather in the morning, put the gherkins in a bathtub with ice to keep them crisp, chop the garlic, wash the dill, carefully stack the gherkins in jars, and pour in the brine. We also eat a lot of herring and drink whiskey, meaning that once it's time to seal the jars we're slightly drunk and smelling like our ancestors. On tasting our pickles, many have said, "you know you could sell these pickles." We've discussed potential names for the pickles and brand aesthetics. Some have offered to invest. But so far we've been happy to just make enough to last a few months for ourselves and family. My friend Moyshie filmed their grandfather tasting the pickle, chewing in long, mournful motions and saying quietly, "not bad, not terrible," which may be the closest thing to a rave review one could hope for from an old Jew eating a pickle. This year we thought we might do two pickle days: one to make enough for ourselves, and then another where we teach others how to pickle. The response was enthusiastic, and we suddenly needed access to a lot of gherkins, a special variety of cucumber that only grow in summer months.

¶

Gherkins, we've learned, are a quick and ruthless crop. If left on the vine even a day too long they grow too large and soft for pickling. If picked too early, their wart-like bumps remain sharp, like rose thorns, and the taste is too bitter for eating. There are few gherkin growers in Australia and the bigger operations mostly sell to large-scale food operations. (McDonald's more or less has a monopoly on gherkin access, having made an exclusive contract with a man named Tony Parle, Australia's gherkin king.) In previous years, we've had to rely on small scale farmers who grow locally. This means that there is always gherkin insecurity. Last year the whole local crop was wiped out because of the fires. A couple of years ago we put in an order with a farmer only to be told last minute that someone had offered a higher price and he had sold our batch to him. We asked who was so desperate for gherkins that they thought to do this. "Some bloke named Myer Steinberg," the farmer replied. We have since wanted to know who this man is, and where we can find his pickles, as a point of comparison. Myer Steinberg—our pickling nemesis.

¶

This year we started planning early, discussing potential suppliers on a shared WhatsApp group which, in non-pickle season, is reserved for harshly criticizing sub-par pickles, analyzing the minutiae of various intra-Jewish community culture wars, and comparing Holocaust dreams. We ended up connecting with a guy called Ankush who works for a vegetable wholesaler. He said he could get us as many gherkins as we needed, around 130kgs all up, but that the crop might be later than usual because of the unusually cool summer we're having in Australia.

¶

In the first week of February, Ankush confirmed that he could get us the first batch of gherkins. We arranged to pickle at Daniel's, who lives at his Bubba's old, classic mid-century apartment—the same Bubba whose recipe we use. I picked up Moyshie on the way, who had a 20 liter plastic tub to put their pickles in, and Jia Jia, Moyshie's friend, who brought along some coriander seeds from her parents "hobby farm". The gherkins were already cooling on ice in the bath when I arrived. My friend Amichai and I walked to a nearby park to pick oak leaves from a tree, which, if put inside the jar with the gherkins release tannins that keep the cucumbers crunchy. As we picked leaves from the trees, already smelling vaguely of smoked fish and whiskey, I could see a family playing basketball at the park looking at us curiously. "Do you think we're allowed to harvest oak leaves from a public park," I asked Amichai, who was busy comparing the leaves on the tree to a picture of oak leaves on his phone, making sure that these were indeed oak leaves, that we weren't going to accidentally poison ourselves.

¶

We pickled late into the night and produced 80 kgs of kosher dills. The following Monday, we put in an order with Ankush for another 50 kgs, to use for the community pickle day we were planning that weekend. By Wednesday, though, it was being reported that a hotel quarantine worker had contracted coronavirus from one of the guests and then unwittingly spreading the virus over his busy weekend (he played two rounds of golf, for instance). The total case count in Melbourne was modest, only 13 (coming from NY it seems insane that this even registers at all.) But on Friday night, the authorities announced a snap lock down for five days—a "circuit-breaker", everyone kept saying. By this stage, Ankush had already ordered the 50kgs of gherkins. We had no choice but to divide them between ourselves before lockdown and pickle alone in our houses.

¶

Since then, my house has smelled vaguely like pickles, which might have been what it once smelled like. The neighborhood we live in is where many of the first Jewish families moved after immigrating to Melbourne in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. It was a poor, working class neighborhood, shared with other immigrant communities. The Jews tried to replicate the lives they had in Europe— kosher butchers and restaurants, mikvehs and yeshivahs, Yiddish theaters—and all that with no pogroms. People have told me that the men would walk down the streets at night and argue Talmud, disrupting the otherwise silent Anglo-Saxon nights. There was also a famous pickle shop in the neighborhood run by a man called Mr. Pose, who made classic Kosher dills. As the community became more established and slowly started moving out to suburbs nearer to the ocean, Pose stayed put and kept making pickles. In fact, he made them long enough for me to have tried the product. My grandparents served Pose’s Pickles at Shabbat dinner. They were pretty good; a little soft for me, a little too sour, but certainly the best kosher dill in Melbourne at the time.

¶

The other weekend I went looking for the old Pose pickle shop. Google maps led me a few blocks away to an old double story terrace house with a rusted cast iron awning out the front. The shopfront windows were covered with heavy shutters. There was a faded sign painted on the front facade, "Bushell’s Instant Coffee", but no evidence of pickles. I kept walking around the neighborhood and noticed a few signs of its Jewish history. A yellow Star of David sculpted into the roof of a worker's cottages. Stained wood on the upper right side of doorways—where mezuzahs likely used to hang. I also walked past a tiny alleyway called Steinberg Lane. I looked it up on my phone. It was named after Chaim Steinberg, an orthodox Jew who came to Australia from Palestine in 1924. He landed first in Perth but kept getting fired from his jobs for refusing to work on Shabbat. So he moved to Melbourne, to the shtetl, and, like so many other Jews, went into the shmata business, building a textile mill on a busy street corner, which now bears the family name. He married a woman named Phyllis and together they had several children, one of whom was called Myer—Myer Steinberg, pickle nemesis.