KOOLICKLES: A Special report from Twinkle Van Winkle

A very special thanks to Twinkle and Jeff Clark. Please visit poprockcandymountain to view the full report on Koolickles and to check out Jeff's awesome website.

Bob's Pickle Pops

You KNOW I'm a pickle freak so why are you caught so off guard when you catch me for the first time turning up a jar of pickles and drinking the pickle juice?

You get this look on your face as if I've just done something strange. So pull yourself together and have some manners and wipe that look off your face 'cause SOON I'll be enjoying pickle juice in a new and convenient, portable fashion. I just ordered a box of 20 of Bob's Pickle Pops!

Wouldn't one taste good right now?

Pickle-In-A Van

When I was in the 6th or 7th grade I remember going to Jackson, MS, the state capitol, with my church youth group. At the time, Jackson "The Bold New City", was the only city in the whole state with a MALL and this mall had a glass elevator...ooooohhhh... AND a Hickory Farms store....aaaaahhhhhh.....and THIS was my primary reason for going to church on a regular basis. Not fellowship with teenaged, like-minded Christians, sorry mom and dad (and Jesus), but for the chance to endure a 4 hour van or bus ride a couple of times a year to go to the MALL, more specifically to go to a store in the mall that was known for its sausage...(please note I KNOW this image is of Hillshire Farms summer sausage but come on-it's a yard-o-beef regardless!)

Do people outside of the South know this store? Eventually most of the stores closed and you would only see a Hickory Farms cart in the mall around Xmas time-they were acclaimed for their "summer sausage" and gift baskets of said meat, mustard and those little strawberry candies. My family always had a log of summer sausage at Xmas time and my dad, sister and I would sit down and hack into that thing with no mercy every year.

My best friend, Christy, and I ran to the Hickory Farms store as soon as we were off the church bus. The store had dark red tile floors and wooden beamed ceilings. The counter was in the middle of the store with a nice old lady wearing a red and white gingham apron behind it handing out samples of meat. There were huge glass containers of rock candy and bags of "melt away mints"...it was exactly how I imagined Germany to be, never having been there myself. Since her allowance was much larger than mine, Christy would usually splurge for a log of sausage, rock candy in every color, and bags of mints while I shyly asked for $3.00 worth of sliced pepperoni and the small "stocking stuffer" sized log of summer sausage. Imagine our delight on this trip when we discovered next to the delicious meat logs, PICKLES-In-A-Bag. Individually packaged pickles in their own little sack o' juice...they were a Van Holten's product called Picante Pickles. Yeah, I'm sure you're all familiar with the "pickles in a pouch" that are readily available now in most gas stations and other places that sell "pouched" products (tobacco chaw, beef jerky, big league chew), but at the time, in the mid-'80's,in Mississippi, these were exotic, luxury items. And the packaging was handsome, a pickle entwined in cucumber vines and Van Holten's in beautiful cursive script at the top.

After rounding up the church teens from their shopping sprees at Spencer's Gifts & Novelties we were all back on the bus. I had to have that pickle right then and there but I was hesitant...I was at that tender age where I had sadly realized that eating a pickle in front of 2 or more teenage boys was, well...complicated. Surely eating a pickle on a church bus would be fine...so I decided to proceed in a way that of course became ritualized by a need to take it slowly. I bit a teeny, tiny hole kind of close to the top of the bag so that I could first suck all of that picante pickle juice out. Once that was accomplished I ripped open the rest of the top of the pouch and bit off the top of the pickle. It must have been painful to watch, but by this time we were probably 2 hours into the trip back home and I'm sure if any boy had been watching earlier, he lost interest 1.75 hours ago.

I'm not sure how many pickles in a bag we bought that first time at Hickory Farms, but you can bet I stocked up on as many as I could the next time I made it there. At Xmas that year I found a whole display case of Picante Pickles under the tree for me! Thank you Santa! or Jesus or whoever!

Pickle Martini

Recipe:

Take a jar of McClure's Pickles to your local bartender and ask them to make it for you.
Thanks to Chris at East River Bar.

The Pantry

I grew up in Mississippi and some summers, not every summer, we would be lucky enough to make our own pickles. We'd make quarts and quarts of them and leave them to sit on the high shelves of our "pantry". It wasn't a well stocked pantry of staples (unless you count Kraft mac and cheese as a staple) but more of a closet of antiques and pure junk. And therefore, it was the most fascinating room in the house.

We bought our house from a Russian Jewish family, The Bergmans, who had built the place just after the Civil War. The mother died (Mrs. Bergman was said to haunt the house) while her 2 sons were off at school at West Point and so they never came back. Everything of the family's was left behind...and most of the ephemera was in the "pantry". Old 78 records, bottles of Jewish wine, pairs of tiny handmade leather shoes of Mrs. Bergman's and mixed in with all of that you could also find our stuff-old xmas decorations, rows of National Geographic magazines from the '40's, piano sheet music, and of course, the pickles. It was almost impossible to keep me out of there.

We would let the pickles, well, pickle, for at least 2 months... It sure seemed like much longer. In fact, in my mind we put the pickles up in August and it seemed like it was next SPRING before we were allowed to open them...I bet I asked my mother "are they ready yet?" at least 5 times a day, the waiting was agonizing. Christmas came MUCH faster.

Last summer my mother came across a handwritten copy of my grandmother's pickle recipe and decided to make a few jars with her granddaughters (my nieces, born pickle freaks). It had been years since she last made them but all the ingredients were easily available fresh from the area farms and in one afternoon they had put away several jars in the good 'ol pantry. I was jealous that I couldn't have been there that afternoon and already anticipating the envy of my nieces getting to eat them. Some weeks later I got a one line text from my sister: "They taste just like I remember Mammy's"...

All over again I was 8 years old dying to get into the pantry. Lucky for me, my mother mailed me 2 jars. She had to hide the jars from my nieces, yes, really HIDE them from them, which makes me beam with pride, they are such beautiful little pickle freaks!

Refrigerate After Opening

Hello, my name is Katy and I'm a Pickle Freak.

As a small child it was unwise to leave me unattended as I was quiet and could sneak into the fridge and devour a whole jar of pickles in one sitting. Eventually my sister and I had to find a way to make our pickles LAST so we wouldn't run out so quickly and have to beg for more. These were homemade pickles and a precious commodity. First we would eat all of the "bumps" on the skin of the pickle, one by one, slooowly, then we developed a way to "mine" the inside of a pickle. We would take a drinking straw and try to extract all the juice, after nibbling the outside, and once dehydrated we would split the pickle open and slowly indulge in what remained of our pickle corpse. Pretty ritualistic stuff. We had an equally disturbing and specific way of eating Slim Jims too, but I'll save that for later!

So yeah, I could talk about pickles all day long and that's just what I intend to do here.