The Minnesota Pickle

My sister, Maren, and I eating pickles in our Arizona home.

Ask anyone what my favorite food is, and they probably will answer with pickles. The other probable answer is chocolate, but that’s a tale for another time. There is never a shortage of pickles at my house or a family gathering. Whether it’s Christmas dinner, a smaller meal or appetizers that are pulled out while socializing, pickles always make an appearance in the nostalgic crystal pickle serving dishes. In more casual moments at my house, when we can’t wait to satisfy our pickle craving, we eat pickles right out of the jar. All you need is a fork to spear your chosen pickle to have the perfect snack.

During my brief stint in a sorority, my shortened pledge name became “pickles”. Due to the food’s unusual place in my heart, at our retreat, I had had to improvise a children’s story about a little pickle lady whose pickles had been eaten. But my outward show for my favorite food had started long before that. I wrote about them in an elementary school assignment, complete with a picture of my favorite brand.

Elementary School tribute to my favorite food.

Everything I wrote then still rings true today. Pickles, store-bought or home-canned, are the perfect combination of a salty and sour, yet somehow sweet, crunch. They are always best served chilled, either right out of the fridge or from the depths of the cool pantry in the basement, though I have been known to pop open a room-temperature jar as soon as it arrives home from the grocery store. When all the pickles are gone, my Dad and I will even scoop the jar clean of its dill and garlic pieces.

As my artwork affirms, my favorite store-bought pickles are Gedney’s Baby Baby Dills, specifically the Minnesota State Fair Award-Winning Recipe of Kathy Earnest. Her recipe won the Blue Ribbon in the Gedney competition and earned her a special place in pickle history, among 11 others whose recipes have won and are sold by the Gedney company. Her picture is right on the jar’s label and I even tried my best to emulate that in my artwork.

While Gedney is one of the top pickle producers in the U.S., its products aren’t readily available out west. My family found this out the hard way when we moved out to Arizona in the summer of 1997. We tried other brands, but nothing could match the taste of Gedney and Kathy Earnest’s dill pickles. When my Dad’s parents would drive all the way down from Minnesota to stay in a friend’s vacation trailer for a season, they would bring us an entire cardboard box packed with jars of the State Fair recipe. That was such a treat. My mom would end up almost rationing the pickles to make the supply last as long as it could.

While these pickles hold a special place in my family’s stories, Gedney pickles hold a celebrated spot in Minnesota’s. Matthias Anderson Gedney had worked in various pickling companies on the east coast and eastern edge of the Midwest. In 1879, he moved to Minneapolis to try his own ideas about pickling. He helped to challenge the idea that cucumbers, a semi-tropical vine fruit, couldn’t grow in the fertile farmland of Minnesota. He and his farmers were successful and opened the first Gedney plant in Minneapolis in 1881. The company has expanded and branched out into various pickle and condiment recipes since.

I believe my family’s continued affinity for Gedney pickles is a testament to their legacy. After all, as their jingle goes, “You betcha, Gedney, it’s the Minnesota pickle!”