I like pickles, but if you offer me a jar of my Aunt Ruth’s pickles…I hide them. Seriously. I sit in a dark corner where no one else can see and eat just one. Then I hide the jar again. They are a precious commodity. One that isn’t shared in abundance and is extremely hard to come by. You are only offered one jar each year. ONE jar. You have to make it last and I don’t care how much you love your spouse and kids…this is the one thing you just don’t want to share. ONE jar, that’s it. That equals out to about 24 pickles. That is 2 per month. That is all you get and if you decide to share they are gone in one week. They have been known to be gone in one day.
If you are really, really lucky your Mom lives next door and you can sneak over to her house when she isn’t home and eat a pickle out of her jar of Aunt Ruth’s pickles. At her house you have to be careful though. Their have been known to be imitations in her refrigerator. You have to know the difference or else open every jar of homemade pickles and take a sample till you find the right jar. Not that I would ever do such a thing mind you.
This year, I decided that I would take Aunt Ruth’s recipe and try my hand at making my own pickles and hope like the dickens they turn out like hers.
I had a couple of issues right off though. First, I couldn’t find fresh dill…ANYWHERE. And I looked, and looked, and looked. I went to 14 different grocery stores. I went to the Mennonite’s. I asked everyone I knew to ask. I ended up using dill seed since I wasn’t ever able to find the fresh stuff.
The next issue is that I was unsure of what to do about one of the instructions in her recipe…you will see, because I am going to write it exactly as she did. I wish I had a portable xerox phaser 8560. That way I could just go in a copy all of her recipes….
RUTH’S KOSHER DILL PICKLES
1 mess small cucumbers (as many as you have)
2 quarts vinegar
2 quarts water
1 1/2 cups Kosher Salt
1 TBSP alum
1 head Dill Weed for each jar
1 clove fresh garlic for each jar
Wash the cucumbers. Mix the water, vinegar, salt and alum and bring to a boil.
Using hot quart jars, put 1 head dill weed and 1 clove of garlic into each jar. Pack with cucumbers. Fill each jar with the boiling mixture and seal each jar with a hot lid and ring.
That is all there is to her recipe. And I made 12 jars. I would really like to have made 52 jars. That is a jar a week. Then I might would be open to sharing. Might be, mind you…I didn’t say I definitely would. Ok, so I would and I will. But when I get my jar from Aunt Ruth this Christmas, I am still going to hide that one.
Ruth had gotten up early that morning and peeled all the green tomatoes that go into making the chow chow. Once we all arrived and got the assembly line going it went pretty fast. See, that is the thing about canning, gather up a couple of family members and friends and you can make a party out of it.
