Picklesburgh!

It is July 12 ... the day that every gherkin-dunking, brine-swigging, Peter Piper wannabe dreams about all year long.

It is the annual Picklesburgh Festival here in Pittsburgh.

And it's a big dill.

You might think that's the only joke you could possibly make out of dill pickles.

You would be wrong, my friend. Do not underestimate what a city of 300,000 creative souls can come up with, given an entire year of silent, meditative reflection ... and probably some beer.

But What Is Picklesburgh?

Picklesburgh is not just a speciality food festival. It is the #1 American Specialty Food Festival as voted by the readers of USA Today ... four out of the last ten years, no less. It attracts 200,000 people on a year.

Amy and I are two of them ... two newly-baptized, starry-eyed Yinzers staring at this spectacle, ready to throw our hats into the air like Mary Tyler Moore. We're gonna make it after all. In Picklesburgh!

For the past couple of years, they tried to cram Picklesburgh onto the waterfront and PPG Plaza areas. This year, it is back on their original homes on the Roberto Clemente and Andy Warhol bridges. (The Rachel Carson Bridge abstained, although it's unclear what Rachel Carson herself thought of pickles. I'll bet she liked them. She was a marine biologist, pickles are briny ... you do the math).

Picklesburgh on the bridges feels natural. The center lane hosts slow-moving traffic and "little gherkins" (a/k/a "kids") sit in wagons hugging their little pickle dolls. The tented food vendors hug the edges of the bridge, and long winding lines of people whip around stanchion poles, waiting for their allocation of pickled goodness:

• Pickle Beer
• Pickle Margaritas
• Pickle-Topped Pizza (one of the longest lines I've seen)
• Hot Dogs with all kinds of Pickled Stuff on Them
• Cuban Sandwiches - not even possible without a pickle, my friend
• Deep Fried Pickles
• Pickle Soup
• Pickle Fudge

I'm slobbering, but I can't eat most of the stuff because I had a tooth crown fall off the day before. (I was eating English muffins with Peanut Butter, a food that has broken more than one crown in my lifetime, oddly).

Luckily, Amy and I are able to gum down:

• Pickle Ice Cream - Our favorite, hands down. This is not the first time I had pickle ice cream - my first taste was at the legendary Ivana Cone in Lincoln, Nebraska. The combination of a little sour and savory dill balances out sweetness remarkably well. I would eat this any day of the year, but on a 93 degree day, it's particularly refreshing.
• Pickle Smash Lemonade - Serious stuff, with two lemon halves bobbing up and down in it, plus a slurry of pickled bits on the bottom ... basically it looks just like a pickle jar after you're done eating all the pickles in it.

A woman in line is chowing down on a pickle skewered on a bamboo stick. Amy asked, "where'd you get that?" and the woman pointed all the way down the bridge. Ironically, it's tough to get just a pickle at Picklesburgh.

And sweet pickles? Forget it. They are nowhere to be found. Also, there is no ketchup at the hot dog stand. Clearly there is a correct way to eat stuff, and we are all being educated in a very passive-aggressive way.

There is the Dill-Cathalon, which draws a big crown. The trifecta of events:

• Brine Chugging - in which someone must chug a one-gallon bottle of pickle brine without gagging. No brine left behind!
• Pickle Bobbing - like bobbing for apples, but makes a ton more sense
• Pickle Eating - and of course, just straight eating-as-many-pickles-as-you-can in a minute.

What does it take to train for such events? I can't even imagine.

Heinz

Who, pray tell, is responsible for this green attack on the senses? It is Heinz, whose headquarters are kinda, sorta in Pittsburgh. But not really, because these days Heinz is part of some conglomerate that also sells machine screws, cigarettes, weed killer, and baby food. I can't keep track of it all.

But yes, Heinz started Picklesburgh 10 years ago, the offshoot of some informal Pickle Brine drinking contests that had grew up organically. Anyway, the classic Heinz icon is a pickle. A good many of Heinz's 57 food products were pickles of some sort.

On that topic, where did the number 57 come from? The short answer is they pulled it out of their ass. There was actually more than 60 Heinz products at the time, but the number 57 just sounded good so they went with it. Of course this makes sense that it's not a real number. I mean, c'mon. What were they gonna do when some bright product developer came up with the 58th variety? Recall all their products and reprint the labels? Drop some other product?

OK, back to the pickle. Being situated in Pittsburgh, the Heinz corporation catered to a huge, diverse European and Russian population. Pickles were a staple of their cuisines, but different pickles were more popular with different cultures. So in the early days of Heinz, you could get:

• Pickled Beets
• Pickled Cabbage
• Pickled Onions
• Pickled Horseradish (maybe you don't think of that as pickled, but prepared horseradish is just that)
• Pickled Celery !

Heinz invented the "pickle tank car" which is a train car full of pickles ready for dumping into jars or barrels. They built these so they could pickle cucumbers very close to the source - the vast fields that yielded millions of pounds of easy-to-grow gherkins, the pickle of choice.

Here's the thing. Pickles are a big reason the human race is still around. We need vegetables, and you need them all year long. Trouble is, you only get vegetables for a few weeks a year. Pickling is one of the best preservation methods for vegetables, with the salt and vinegar combining to halt the growth of bad bacteria ... you know, the rot you find on those vegetables you just bought at Aldi's, facing the back of the refrigerator case.

Heinz may no longer be the #1 pickle supplier. I see a lot more Vlasic on the shelves these days, not to mention the more trendy refrigerator pickles like Claussen. But they still sell a lot of pickle relish, which is actually an unholy mix of cucumbers, cabbage and bell pepper. A nice foil for mustard, though. (Not ketchup! For crying out loud. Pay attention!).

And if people associate Heinz most with ketchup, they also associate them with pickles as well because of the logo. And if you're in the UK ... baked beans. But that's another story.

Will there be a Baked Bean Festival in the UK? Hah. They wish.

My History With Pickles

My grandmothers made a lot of pickles. There was a pickle relish tray at every dinner, plus lunch on Sunday (the big meal after church). The pickles were mostly homemade. I remember rows and rows of pickle jars down in the basement or cellar.

BTW, if you go to the restaurant ROVI in London (which I would recommend to anyone who remotely likes food), jars of pickled vegetables are a big part of the interior design. What can I say? My grandparents were hip and trendy.

Anyway, as a kid I avoided dill pickles. I loved sweet ones - deep green, or the yellowish bread-and-butter pickles (later I would find the yellow was tumeric).

And then I was somewhere around seven or eight years old, I had dinner with at my Grandma Titus's, and my cousins were there ... including my cousin Jay who was just a month older than me, and the coolest guy on the face of the planet. (And still is, I might add). Anyway he grabs the pickle tray and just loads his plate with dill pickles. Like to the point where there's no room for anything else. His brothers and sisters follow suit and one of them - maybe Jonelle - remarks, "I just love pickles."

At that point I thought, hmmm ... maybe dill pickles aren't so bad. So I try a few of them. Yeah, they're OK. They're actually a good foil to sweet pickles. Like an appetizer and a dessert. From then on, I take a few of each at my grandmother's house. I put them on different sides of the plate, though. I don't want them to touch and cause some nuclear chain reaction or whatever.

Yeah we had pickles at home too, but my mom didn't bother canning them much. When you can get them at Sunshine for $0.69 a jar, it's hard to justify pulling out the canner. My father would make a sandwich out of toast, peanut butter and dill pickles. That grossed us kids out, but I think I would enjoy a sandwich like that now. It'd probably break one of my tooth crowns, but whatever.

Then refrigerator pickles like Claussens started hitting the shelves. That was the first time I ate dills with a major garlic hit: you know, the East Coast way. It was a revelation. Pickles could be big and bold and crunchy and assertive. I started pairing them with cheddar cheese - an awesome combination if you've never tried it. For awhile that was my goto before-bed snack. (The other being Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts).

These days if I buy pickles, I go straight for Grillos, a Boston-based often. They tick onions in the pickle brine, which is a very good thing.

But more often, I just make them. My Great Aunt Edna passed down a refrigerator pickle recipe that is really easy and the end product is pure perfection. It is a sweet pickle, a bread and butter pickle to be exact, but it has just enough savoriness to be a well-rounded, tasty, good-for-what-ails-ya pickle.

Joshua McFadden, a cookbook author who I follow religiously, has prompted me to branch out with pickles. Under his cookbook's guidance (Six Seasons), I have pickled jalapenos, zucchini and red onions. These are marvelous condiments indeed - great on salad, divine on a sandwich, definitive perched atop a grain bowl.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the wonder drug that is pickle juice. I discovered pickle juice at the the MS Chesapeake Bicycle Challenge in 2017, where they serve them at every rest stop. The past few years it's been in the form of Bob's Pickle Pops, ice pops made from pickle brine.

You sweat out a lot of salt and electrolytes on a century ride - 100 miles in a day. Pickle juice replenishes that. Is it better than Gatorade? I think so. It's definitely less sweet, and doesn't coat my mouth with gummy stuff like Gatorade does. It definitely gets me to the finish line. It could all be psychosomatic, but the secret of athleticism (which I didn't learn until age 50) is it's all psychosomatic anyway. I can't really ride 100 miles in a day. Are you nuts?

That's Like Pittsburgh

I would be dill-lightful to talk about pickles all day, but I gotta end somewhere. Dig some of the other contenders for Top 10 Specialty Food Festival of 2025:

• Rhode Island Seafood
• Georgia Peach
• Buffalo Wing Fest
• Delta Hot Tamale

These are, no doubt, some places to get really awesome food. I'm not gonna say no to a hot tamale.

But man they are just are so serious.

On the other hand ... Picklesburgh. You can't say it without smiling. The only contender in the that department is the Wisconsin Cheese Curd festival. Which I'm putting that on my bucket list, by the way.

You tell people you're going to the Rhode Island Seafood festival ... ho hum. You tell people you're going to Picklesburgh, a festival that celebrates the pickle, and they're like - "have you lost your friggin' mind?"

No. I have found it.

My peeps are all eating pickles on a stick. It took my 60 years to find them, but here we are.