Homemade Branston® pickle with English cheddar cheese sandwich.

Homemade ploughman's pickle with English cheddar. ©Ryan Schierling

I cannot claim to have invented this sandwich, nor would I. It is a simple cheese sandwich with a legendary dark-brown English chutney-style spread that is bracingly tangy, crunchy, sweet, and a twee bit savory at the same time. If you’re across the pond, it is a sin to eat a cheese sandwich without Branston® pickle.

I am not an Anglophile and I'm not across the pond, but I have been eating pickle and cheese sandwiches for a while now. I came by a jar of Branston® at a shop in Seattle in the late 90s, picked it up out of curiosity – one for me and one as a gift – and have been preaching the gospel of ploughman’s lunch ever since. 

But I never, ever, ever thought to try and make pickle. It’s like making ketchup, or catsup, or whatever. It’s like making butter. It’s like making mayonnaise or mustard. So few hand-make the staples anymore, they just buy them at the grocer. This tart, sweet, "what-the-hell-should-I-do-with-this-mess?" condiment is not for everyone, but the Branston® traditional recipe has been the same for more than 90 years, and pickle fans are legion in the UK. It may be an acquired taste, though I also believe it's a very geographically-defined and refined taste. 

Following the fete.

(Bottles L-R) Limoncello, plum bourbon, Rainier cherry bump. © Ryan Schierling

We kind of skipped the ever-inundating pre-Thanksgiving food-blog blast this year, instead opting to toast to some post-feast palliatives. You already know what to do with your turkey, you know how to make the classic sides and the not-so-classic sides, you know how to crank out handcrafted heirloom sweet potato ice cream with back-woods small-batch maple syrup and homemade marshmallows, obviously.

Obviously. 

Get started on a few of these tipples now and you'll have plenty of practice time before next season's holiday haze begins. 

There are menu pages of before-dinner drinks available. Some people just call those drinks. The French have a couple of words that have become synonymous with the intake of specific alcoholic beverages before and after dinner – apéritif and digestif – which basically mean "to open" and "a digestive." In America, we call apéritifs "happy hour," and that's unfortunate, because it literally translates to "half-price well drinks and non-import draft beers, cheapskate."

Apertifs are usually herbal recipes meant to stimulate the appetite. I don't typically need a reason to be hungry, so here at home we occasionally like to sip on the after-dinner beverage – the digestif. 

Pickled ugly.

Wait for it. © Ryan Schierling

Nobody likes okra. There's no good use for it. It's unsightly, it's slimy and mucilaginous, it's a disgusting fibrous little pod that has no redeeming qualities and even less flavor. The only possible way to eat it is to batter it, deep-fry it and dip it in ranch dressing, which is (while delicious) the lowest common denominator for food. You could deep-fry poison oak leaves, dip them in ranch and they would be palatable (until your throat swelled shut).

Okay, I'll take that back. No, not the lowest common denominator part about frying vegetables and dipping them in ranch dressing, but the part about okra being completely unlovable. 

A friend with a quarter-acre garden had an okra bounty this year that was entirely unmanageable. He gave away gallon-size plastic bags of the stuff, and would have another one for you before you could even think of what to do with the last one. 

Of course, we sliced, rinsed, soaked in buttermilk, battered and fried them. We made Bhindi Masala (turns out that slime cooks away nicely). We pickled them with tons of garlic and Tabasco peppers from our garden. 

(L) Garlic and Tobasco peppers. (R) Okra, pre-pickling. © Ryan Schierling

And now, surprisingly, every time I snag a spicy, crunchy, pickled pod from one of the many, many jars in the refrigerator, I can't help but think how pretty those ugly little things are. 

Little hands pack pretty jars.

Canning notes. © Ryan Schierling

When I was small, we had a huge garden behind our house. It was actually more like a giant community pea-patch, maybe two or three acres large and shared by roughly 20 homes that backed to it all the way around. There was plenty of room for a family to plant 10 rows of corn and six or eight large squash mounds, plus rows of green beans, peas, beets and carrots.

I really don't remember a summer or fall when there wasn't something being frozen or dried or canned or eaten straight from the garden. And whether it was snapping green beans, shelling peas, or shucking corn – I was perfectly capable of helping so long as a knife wasn't involved.

And when the annual fruit delivery arrived, there was more for me to do than just eat. In those days, our modest little eastern Washington community would get together and order pallets full of peaches, pears, apples, apricots and cherries. Flat upon flat of ripe fruit would cover the floor in our garage – some to eat now, some to dehydrate or freeze. But most was for canning, which was an event unto its own – all hands on deck, and little hands were no exception.