word through the times
Spicy brines, baseball debacles and burger accouterments: Pickles are easy to get caught in, and even easier to enjoy.
In Word Through The Times, we trace how one word or phrase has changed throughout the history of the newspaper.
The summer of 2022 was “hot pickle summer.”
That is, according to Kim Severson, a New York Times reporter who covers food culture. Pickle seasoning was flavoring dips, chips, even pizza.
“We were crazy for the pickle flavor,” Ms. Severson said in an interview. We still are: Consider that Times Cooking offers recipes for a pickle-brine margarita and a dill pickle tzatziki.
The Times has been telling readers to pickle foods since 1861, Ms. Severson said.
A Times recipe for pickled eggs in 1861, which has one of the first appearances of the word “pickle” in the newspaper, was less inventive than recent concoctions but no less tasty. “With cold meat they are a most delicious and delicate pickle,” the article stated.
While pickling goes back thousands of years, the word “pickle” itself first appeared in English around the 15th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; it meant a spicy sauce served with meat. It soon referred to a salty or acidic liquid used to preserve food, usually fruits or vegetables. Eventually, the process of soaking food in the “pickle” was called “pickling,” and the product itself was a “pickle” or a “pickled” food.
“Pickle” comes from the Middle Dutch word pekel, meaning to prick or pierce, the lexicographer Grant Barrett said in an interview. The spicy and salty flavor of the brine, he added, “pricks or pierces your tongue, metaphorically.”
The colloquial phrase “in a pickle,” meaning in a predicament, was popularized in the 1600s after “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare — but he had likely used it to mean intoxication. How the prevailing meaning of the phrase came to be is a bit of a mystery.
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