Canning Craze Continues

I don’t know what the deal is in other areas of the country, but here in Miami, pickling cucumbers are available year-round. I would assume that’s true everywhere, in the era of trucks and trains, but Ronni Lundy’s cookbook, Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken, says they’re only available in the summer. Whatever the deal is, I bought a bunch of them today in an effort to replicate the sweet pickles my granny used to make. Unfortunately, I forgot the green food coloring she used so liberally. And I suspect she used calcium chloride to keep the pickles crunchy.

Right now I’m sterilizing jars, and I have the pickles on salt, and I’ve mixed the other ingredients. The kitchen smells EXACTLY like my grandmother’s basement! It’s like having a time machine in my nose.

The recipe in Lundy’s book calls for brown sugar and onions, but I used white sugar and skipped the onions. That seems more like what Granny did.

Can’t wait to see if this works.

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Here’s what I got. This is exactly the shade of green Granny used to get.