Alex Meier   –   ABC7 New York

To New Yorkers, the pickle is more than a salty cucumber that pairs nicely with a burger.

“New York City should be called the Big Pickle instead of the Big Apple,” says Alan Kufman of The Pickle Guys.

But what makes the pickle more “New York” than a bagel or a taxicab?

According to Lower East Side Tenement Museum associate Adam Steinberg, the pickle is – both literally and figuratively – a preserved memory, unique to the region.

“The pickle represents a New York that is disappearing, as it becomes a more gentrified, corporate chain store kind of place. We hunger for the artisanal, old-fashioned, handmade, personal relationship,” he said. “It makes us feel like New York is unique and not just another big city.”

In fact, New York City pickles are older than the city itself. The Dutch, and later the English, brought pickles from Europe. Without modern refrigeration, pickles provided these early settlers a way to eat veggies during the barren winter months.

But by the turn of the 19th century, the influx of immigration caused an explosion in pickle production. Unable to speak English, immigrants of Polish, German and Jewish decent employed themselves through buying pushcarts and selling pickles on the streets.

The first pushcart peddlers opened shop in the 1860s, said Steinberg, but by 1900, there were about 3,000 in the city, primarily in the Lower East Side. By 1910, the stench of dill and garlic clogged Essex Street, leaking into the walls of tenements and spilling into surrounding neighborhoods. The airspace was also overwhelmed with the sound of mothers haggling with pickle peddlers over mere pennies.

“Pennies were the difference between having to treat their sick child and burying their child,” said Steinberg.

In time, a coalition of police, health and safety officials and store owners fought to jar up the pickled pandemonium. By 1940, New York City outright banned street commerce. Over the years, more and more pickle stores began to close up, leaving only a handful, like The Pickle Guys.

“People in all the stores get old, and their children don’t want to go into this business because it’s a lot of work. They smell like pickles. So they go and become dentists or accountants,” said Kufman.

Still, Patricia Fairhurst, owner of Clinton Hill Pickles, sees a bright future for the pickle business.

“A lot of people, they’re into healthier food, and a lot of kids, they eat more healthy,” she says. “So it’s kind of going in full circle.”

That’s exactly how the inaugural National Pickle Week was celebrated in 1949

Eliza Berman @lizabeaner   –   TIME

Dill Lamar Pickle reclining in a rubber boat in a vat of pickles for National Pickle Week. – 

Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

There are many ways to celebrate National Pickle Day on Nov. 14, the tastiest of which would be to enjoy a half-sour or a kosher dill. Another option? Floating in giant vat of pickles, as modeled by Mr. Dill Pickle, a fortuitously named resident of Mississippi, during the inaugural Pickle Week celebration in 1949.

In what may be the most alliterative article ever published in LIFE magazine—“Packers preach their product’s perfection with a peck of publicity,” reads the deck below the headline—an image of Mr. Pickle appears above a description of the activities organized by the National Pickle Packer’s Association:

They invented liquor-flavored pickles, crowned a Pickle Queen amid flaming pickles in a Chicago nightclub, and proclaimed as their Man of the Year Mr. Dill Lamar Pickle of Rolling Fork, Miss., who obligingly posed in a vat of pickles.

From a business standpoint, the week was a success: Pickle sales increased by 22%. From a floating-in-a-vat-of-brined-cucumbers perspective: also a major win.

By Carmen Machado | NPR

The Pickle Index app — one way to experience Eli Horowitz’s newest novel and multimedia project — opens with what looks like an ad for an Apple product. Millennials gather to feast together in a stylishly decorated home, laughing and communing silently behind a veneer of electric pop. They lay down newspaper; they tuck napkins into their shirt collars. But instead of plates of steamed seafood or roasted vegetables, a tray is overturned before them, and there are … pickles. Huge, meaty dill pickles. The hip young friends joyfully pick up the pickles. (Sorry.) They gnaw on them with relish. (Sorry, again.) They laugh and laugh and smile and laugh through pulpy mouthfuls of masticated cucumber. By then, it’s less of a commercial for an iPhone and more of a surreal illustration of the kind of life you could have in a world where everything is pickled and pickles are everything.

But to the story, that is to say, the actual narrative of The Pickle Index in all of its iterations: In an oppressive autocracy, Zloty Kornblatt and his sad little circus couldn’t get a laugh if they tried. But then one fateful night — through a series of comical mishaps, and without trying at all — he is unintentionally funny, and accidentally impersonates The Prime Mother of their government, Madam J, and her beloved pet octopus Simeon. Zloty brings down the house, but unfortunately, there’s an informer in the audience. The next day, he is gone, taken in the night, leaving his inept, ragtag group of performers to head to the capital city to find him and bring him home.

This story, told in alternating chapters, is narrated by Flora, Zloty’s assistant, and is ostensibly being written down by her and fed into The Pickle Index, the city’s cumbersome cucumber (Forgive me!) network, full of briny and fermented recipes for citizens to make in their own homes. The chapters between Flora’s narration take the form of columns from the local newspaper, The Daily Scrutinizer. Zloty has been taken, Hank Hamper writes, because of his subversion. But Hank’s absurd allegations have a sinister edge: Zloty is in danger of perfunctory trial and a seemingly infinite menu of outlandish execution methods.

There are three ways to experience The Pickle Index, all of which can stand on their own. The first is its paperback novel, which is entirely text aside from small black-and-white woodcuts. The second is a hardcover, two-book set. These books are gorgeously illustrated by Ian Huebert, but they stand out for other reasons. The two books are not simply the paperback with color; instead, they are the two types of chapters separated: the “News” (from The Daily Scrutinizer) and the “Snacks” (Flora’s more or less straightforward narration of the story). These books can be read separately, but the illustrations in each encourage the reader to read the books back and forth, or at the very least turn and twirl the illustrations to see how they connect with, compliment, or contradict each other.

As for the app, it is different thing entirely, while still being more of the same. Within the app are the two sections yet again: the newspaper, and Flora’s chapters nestled amongst the Index. Once the reader has read the necessarily elements, they can progress through the story in real time, or with the narrative accelerated. Additionally, the app has one-off jokes and minor side plots — including two soldiers trapped in a submarine together, squabbling in the Q&A section. You, the reader, are also integrated into this frustrating world, and have to (among other things) manipulate the Index’s deliberately clunky interface.

Eli Horowitz is known for his multi-platform, interactive literary collaborations, including The Silent History, which tracked a fictional epidemic of muteness across time and distance, and was a print novel and an app. He has an active interest in form. And in many ways, The Pickle Index is a delight — the narration is laugh-out-loud funny. There is a certain pathos, though, that doesn’t quite come through; this is a project with slightly more style than substance.

In an ideal world, each form wouldn’t have just been its own experience; together, they should have generated new questions, something greater than the sum of their parts. But for readers who are interested in the potential energy of form, or Horowitz’s oeuvre, The Pickle Index is a fun, strange romp through (last one, promise) an absurdly cured world.

Carmen Maria Machado has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review and AGNI, among other publications.