Pickle Champ Relishes His Achievements

When people find out I’m the dill pickle pickling champ of Los Angeles County, they often ask me: Why?

This year I received first place for my dill pickles at the L.A. County Fair. To be precise, I placed first in the Home Arts Competition, Division 2206 (Pickles and Relishes), Class 10: vegetable pickles; cucumber, dill.

Just to let you know that that was no fluke, I also took first in corn relish, second in pickled onions and third in kosher dills. And just to have something around to eat with all those pickles, I entered the quiche competition and finished second with a spinach and pistachio torte that looks rich enough to cause a coronary.

OK, those are my credentials. But what does it take to be a pickling champ? Skill verging on genius. Dedication verging on mania.

It started years ago. I was born in Los Angeles and some of my fondest memories are of the fair. It’s the biggest and, for my money, the grandest in the country. And, it’s the last of the unchangeables. Everything from barbecued drumsticks to the Indian fry bread, from the model train to the giant slide, is where it always was. About the only difference is that they changed the sign out front from “Fair Grounds” to “Fairplex.”

I remember so well, in the Home Arts Building, the towering display of prize-winning preserved fruits and vegetables. The contents of each jar were impossibly perfect. I said to myself: One day, my pickles will be up on that wall.

The first hurdle on the way to becoming champ is remembering to enter the contest. By the time of the fair, it’s too late. You have to sign up now for next year, and entries close about a month and a half before the fair opens to allow time for judging. You get a wonderful book, free, called the Premium Book. It lists all of the contests you can enter and all the rules. This year the book runs to 250 pages.

There are competitions in canning, quilt-making, table decoration, mineral slicing. You can compete in arranging flowers, decorating cakes or in dying eggs in the Ukrainian manner. I thought about the barbecue contest because I’m a mean man with a brazier. But a bear-like guy who looked like the original Mr. BarBeQue had won two years in a row, and I figured he was on a roll. I selected pickles.

The next step is to find a recipe. I’m going to be straight with you: The best place to look is the fair’s own cookbook of prize winners, published annually. Take last year’s winner. Embellish. Improvise. Plagiarize.

Next, go shopping. Scour the farmers’ markets for absolutely fresh produce. Everything’s got to be perfect. Your pickling cucumbers have to be exactly equal in length, straight not bent, and with no blemishes. The judges aren’t just tasting; they’re looking. Appearance counts for a lot.

That means when you stuff the jar with your pickle spears, you’ve got to be careful in producing what we pros call a “tight pack,” that you don’t shave off the little dill seeds so that they end up floating around. You’ve got to be careful that your brine, the combination of water, vinegar and spices you boil and then pour over your pickles to pickle them, turns out clear.

Relax a minute while you’re doing all this and you’ll end up out of the money. (And I do mean money. Not only did I get a blue ribbon, complete with portrait of Thumer, the official fair pig, and the fair insignia, but I won $3.50.)

They say it’s a contest for amateurs. But if all those little old ladies in the still-rural portions of the county and their offspring, all of them even at this moment slaving over their stoves in preparation for next year’s fair, aren’t pros at canning, then tell me, who is?

About a month before the fair, you drive out to a near-deserted Fairplex and leave two jars of each variety entered--one for tasting and one for display. About 50 would-be canning greats entered the pickle and relish division this year; my pickles were up against about 15 other entries.

Then it is time to wait. A panel of home economists and professional teachers of food preparation moves in. If you were present, your knuckles would be turning white. But since you’re not, you wake up in the middle of the night wondering: Did I put in too much dill?

They look for uniformity, color and consistency, then for fullness, neatness and clarity of the pack. Is the jar tightly and properly sealed? What about “natural flavor,” appearance and texture?

The truly fiendish part is that nobody tells you whether you won or not. You have to wait until the official opening and go to see if you made that Wall of Fame.

I couldn’t go to the fair on opening day. My cousin did, however, and called immediately, practically screaming the news. I felt happy. And to celebrate--need I say it?--I opened a jar of pickles.

Now, I’m not saying you can go right out, follow my instructions, and end up canning with the greats. You should have some general background in cooking.

And you should have canning down ahead of time, because when you’ve got several monstrous vats bubbling away on the stove it’s no time to be frantically searching through the Ball Co.’s “Blue Book” for what to do next.

There’s a reason hardly anybody cans anymore. It can be tricky and it’s certainly hard work. Cleanliness counts: You have practically turned your kitchen into an operating theater. Canning a load of anything never takes less than half a day. And inevitably you make mistakes and do dumb things that the books warn you about, because you figure what harm could it do and you’ll get done hours earlier. Only it never works.

Once people canned because it was the only way to have all kinds of fruits and vegetables in the offseason. Nowadays most people can, I imagine, for much the same reason I do--because you can cook up all sorts of strange combinations, like odd chutneys or special mixes of relish, spiced to your taste.

My first-prize corn relish used, instead of the traditional green peppers, green chiles, and instead of red peppers, fresh pimentos.

When I make up a batch of pickles, I always have the idea it’s going to last me until the next summer. After I open a second jar within 24 hours, I begin to understand how much work I’d have to do to have a new jar every other day for a year. After the third jar, the idea of making an extra batch for Christmas gifts goes by the board. I promise everybody Christmas canning. Most are still waiting.

So go for it. But I have to warn you: If you enter next year, you’ll be going up against me.