“I don’t want a pickle. Just want to ride my motorcycle.” That was the start of Arlo Guthrie’s Motorcycle Song released in 1967.
A few years later I was working in a bush camp, and this was long before electronic devices and satellite dishes came into being. So, in camps on your time off, you could read or talk to your fellow camp mates. People had long involved conversations, debates, and occasionally arguments. Discussions could last for hours, days or even weeks, if it was interesting enough.
One day I walked into the kitchen, and I am not sure how it got started but what came to be known as “The Great Pickle Debate” was well underway. The two positions were well defined. One group said that pickles were obviously cucumbers pickled, while the other declared this was ridiculous that pickles were pickles and if they were cucumbers pickled, they would be called pickled cucumbers not, pickles.
One fellow said his Granny use to make pickled cucumbers and she marked the jars accordingly. So obviously his granny knew the difference between the two.
Someone had even done up a list of all the things that get pickled. Pickled beets, carrots, onions, asparagus, rhubarb, eggs, herring, pigs’ feet, mushrooms, chestnuts, and walnuts. It seemed that a person could pickle just about anything.
The argument that no one in camp had ever seen a pickle plant was countered by the fact that no one in camp had seen an avocado tree, peanut farm, or kiwi bush but they exist. They obviously grew in tropical regions. Also, just because pickles might look a little like cucumbers, cucumbers look like zucchinis. But obviously they taste differently as do pickles. The argument was, pickles are pickles and pickle juice was one of the ingredients in pickling everything else.
There were many good arguments raised on both sides. However, we were in a bit of a pickle because no one had a set of encyclopedias with them so how would we end the debate. We even had a jar of pickles in camp, but this was before containers were required to list the ingredients. If we asked the question on the short-wave radio, our only communication with the outside world, they might think we were crazy and how would we know if the answer we got was the right one.
I would walk around camp humming the Motorcycle song but stayed out of the argument because I knew the answer. Our family had done a lot of canning and preserving in the fall, and I had even made pickles but didn’t want to spoil everyone’s fun.
A quote by Rushmore Kidder an ethicist, came to mind “Good ideas, like good pickles, are crisp, enduring and devilishly hard to make.” Everyone seemed to be enjoying the debate as much as a peanut butter and pickle sandwich.
Now speaking of pickles, I would be remiss if I left out mentioning the Christmas Pickle. People buy a little pickle ornament and last thing Christmas eve someone hangs it on the tree. The person who finds it first Xmas morning gets a special Xmas pickle gift or gets to open their presents first or gets good luck all year. Your choice!
Some say it is an old German tradition, but most old Germans have never heard of it. Others think it may have started during the American Civil War when an ill prisoner pleaded for one last pickle and when he was given it regained his health. It’s a bit of a mystery but I suspect someone with a whole lot of pickle ornaments that weren’t selling, made it up. As for the Pickle debate in our camp, it eventually died out and was replaced by some new scintillating topic.
