Wednesday Word: Pickles

The other day I needed to buy a pre-made sandwich at Tesco. I should write an entire post about sandwich varieties, but for now, just take my word that the options differ quite a bit from what you might find in America. I settled on a ham, farmhouse cheddar, and pickle sandwich. It tasted good, but the pickles were definitely NOT pickles in the American sense.


So I asked my English mom friends at Becca's homeschool class later that day to explain to me what pickles were. If I understood correctly, when you see a sandwich advertised as coming with pickles, it means some sort of pickle spread. For the record, it's reddish purple, so I am pretty sure beets are involved. I can't remember the exact brand name they told me about, but I guess this type of pickle is common and widespread (on sandwiches).

But more generally, when sandwiches aren't involved, pickles can be pretty much anything as long as they are, well, pickled...pickled beets, onions, artichokes, even eggs. All of those things can be called "pickles." The pickle shelf in our local Aldi is not quite as intimidating as Tesco's flour shelf, but it comes close.


So what to do if you are looking for good old American pickles? Well, in that case, my friends, you need to get yourself some pickled gherkins.


And for the record, I love that the word gherkin is actually used regularly in this country...(Also, the reddish-purple-pickled-beet-and-whatever-else that was on my sandwich was good. Sweet, but good.)

Comments

  1. din 'illahi4 April 2018 at 17:14

    Thanks for more interesting info about food particulars. Their use of ‘pickle’ makes more sense than our use of it to refer specifically to pickled cucumbers. I wonder how the US usage came about, going from the general to the particular.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rachel5 April 2018 at 08:27

      Yes, I wondered that, too. It is more reasonable to use "pickle" for anything pickled, although more helpful to specify what is being pickled from a consumer's standpoint!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Day in Our Life

Image
I'm joining in the Homeschool Day in Our Life link up at Simple Homeschool today. Since we just moved to England from New England, got sick, got sick some more, and then had the Epic Family Flu Experience, we haven't had very many days that have come anywhere close to normal recently. In fact, this day I'm documenting is the first relatively normal day we've had in months, as luck would have it (with an emphasis on the "relatively"--we still have more boxes to unpack!) So, while this day has gone smoothly and has been blessedly filled with routine, had I written this post just a week ago, it would have involved me curled up feverish on the couch with the kids recovering and using their iPads pretty much all day, and Eric cooking bacon and eggs for dinner (again). Just for full disclosure. But now we're finally healthy, so here is our day: 7-7:45 am: We all wake up at about the same time. In my ideal world, I'd wake up before everyone to write ...
Read more

Laundry

Image
I know this is a topic you've all been waiting for with bated breath: dirty laundry!! When we moved here, our house had a washing machine but no dryer. This is very common for houses here--even in our very affluent village we frequently see wash hanging out to dry (and, to be fair, sometimes getting rained on.) I think moving here as a home-manager and mother has made me notice more the habits and norms. When we lived in Syria Eric and I didn't have kids and I didn't spend much time thinking about running our home (to be honest, mostly because we had cockroaches and there were worms in our shower--I just sort of survived our home that year....) Anyway, coming here as a homemaker has made me think about things like laundry. And that means you lucky readers get a whole post on it! Our washing machine that came with our cottage was on its last legs, and so we replaced it with a washer-dryer combination. But since we don't have a vent we had to get a condenser...
Read more

Our Neighbors the Romans

Image
One of my very favorite things about living in England is the old stuff. I liked that about New England when we moved there from California, too, because in comparison there are older and better preserved houses in New England (with the exception of some cool adobe ruins in a park I used to play in when I was growing up...) But England really beats both California and Massachusetts hands down in the cool-historical-places-and-buildings game!  Pretty much anywhere you drive, you see old things (and old people, too, come to think of it, but that's a post for a different day...) Our little village has lots of history, people having lived here in settlements for two thousand years. And since people have lived here for so long, there are layers of history almost everywhere. Rumor has it, for example, that somewhere around Naunton are the ruins of the last standing round house, that was modeled on the old tribal construction techniques that existed before th...
Read more