Why pickles with sandwiches

Sliced pickled cucumbers layered between two slices of buttered bread was, allegedly, a Depression-era staple, due to the low cost and high availability of those ingredients. Why is it so difficult to find a hard, veritable source for this theory that bread-and-butter pickles were named after a sandwich?

Seems simple enough, if not glaringly obvious. The Joy of Cooking does include a recipe for bread-and-butter pickles, but no bread-and-butter pickle sandwich. Tomato lovers can, however, find a peanut butter and tomato sandwich in Irma S. The Times wrote about it in , and even provided a recipe. Later, a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich also circulated the Internet. But alas, the matching keywords were in a comment by a user, not by Deb Perelman herself.

Perhaps this is the point: The story of the bread-and-butter pickle sandwich lives not on the page, but, as many of the best foods do, in orature oral literature. Word of mouth. Comments sections.

Message boards. Facebook groups. The only way to find its elusive history, then, is to ask around. How did the pickle become such an iconic part of our deli experience? Even the character Tevye pondered this question in Fiddler on the Roof. Where did the pickle come from, and more importantly, why does one always come with your sandwich? Pickles have been around for thousands of years and were considered a delicacy as early as BC. The pickle became popular in the U.

Famous for their unique combinations of meat, Jewish delis in the city used the pickle as a palate cleanser. Meanwhile, as the above article explains, production of corn syrup was increasing rapidly.

What farmer could not resist the promised handouts? The Department of Agriculture was in a right pickle. And it was therefore to pickles that they turned for the solution. At this point a new player enters the story. The Cucumber Institute of America is a shadowy trade organization with a strong lobby presence in Washington and close links to the military-industrial complex.

It persuaded the Department of Agriculture that the smart way to persuade Americans to eat corn syrup was not to use it as a sweetener, but to disguise it in a product that contains a lot of vinegar. That way the public would not know what they were eating. This program was very successful under the Clinton administration. The President was very fond of dill pickles as they reminded him of his favorite hobby.

He even went so far as to suggest an advertising campaign featuring pretty young women lasciviously consuming pickles, but apparently the suggestion was vetoed by his wife. Unfortunately, by the end of the Clinton era, public health activists had begun to get wise to the new tactic. Newspapers began to run scare stories about people suffering from dill pickle cravings.

In the Weekly World News, Bat Boy was quoted as saying that he never ate dill pickles because they gave him gas. Priscilla Presley issued a press statement denying that Elvis had ever eaten a dill pickle. When George W. What they needed, they told him, was a means of persuading Americans to eat dill pickles without realizing that they were doing so.

At the time Cheney was doing research into reviving the Star Wars missile defense project. He took the problem to his science advisors, one of whom remembered reading a science book by a man called Dick that featured Orbital Mind Control Lasers. This resulted in the Vice President making all sorts of tasteless puns about dill pickles, his own name, that of the mysterious Mr.