By The Campfire

May 21, 2008

Maybe contradiction is the religion of the South but irony is its daily bread. Yesterday, several of us sat outside, enjoying the cool sunshine of a sidewalk café beside Richmond’s Main Street in the lowest part of the geographic bowl known as Shockoe Bottom. Edgar Allen Poe walked this very sidewalk as a young man and his home sits two blocks farther down Main toward Millie’s, and Tobacco Row, and Highway 5 paralleling the James River below the falls, and the Virginia plantations headed to Williamsburg.

We talked about pickled eggs and pickled pears and pickled peaches. Some of the fellows in the conversation ate their first pickled egg in a college bar. I grew up with the garish orbs on my grandmother’s kitchen counter beside pickled fruit, beets, and pickled pig’s feet.

After I talked about all of the pickled things I’d eaten while growing up in Alabama, Dee said, “I guess you can pickle anything.”

“My grandmother did,” I answered.

Scott began to talk about his pickled experiences. As he and Dee said things that sounded pickly familiar, I remember my grandfather joking about pickling the dog when he died “just to stay with the standard practice of pickling everything around this place, whether it needs pickling or not.”

My uncle, who at this point in his alcoholic life had pretty much pickled himself, said, “Err gree wid at and den sum. Pickle em verthang an pass a shine.”

Of his response, I only made out “pickle” and “shine,” the two things that sustained him until he died at 95 from falling out of a Chinaberry tree while trying to wave down a Fort Rucker helicopter.

As Scott and Dee talked, I thought about what we found under my grandparent’s house when they were moving to their new place in the early 1960’s: Canned jars of things that had somehow gotten shoved to the back in the dark. Year’s worth of unspeakably canned objects hid under there.

A long time ago in the South, people kept their canned goods under the house because they had no refrigeration. They just piled the new ones in, and often the old ones were lost in the depths.

I was quite young but I remember wiping the dust and dirt from generations off of those old, lost jars and trying to figure out what in the world was in them.

My grandfather squatted down beside me as I examined one of the particularly foul-looking specimens and said, “Let me show you something.” We walked down to the hog pen and he pointed to one of the hog’s feet.

“If you open that jar, hon (he called everyone “hon”), you’ll see your first pickled pig’s feet,” he said with an assurance I didn’t understand. “Probably from when I was your age, from the looks of it.”

How could he know what beastie parts resided in the murky jar?

“My mother canned them when I was young,” he said. “You can open it and look but don’t eat it. You’ll be sicker than Cooter Brown after a bender.”

I didn’t know who Cooter Brown was, but I told him real quick that he need not worry about me eating anything in those jars. If he’d said that aliens had shat them out in 1939 when they landed in the back forty while trying to abduct Uncle Gee, I’d have been no less disgusted by the contents.

My mind was yanked back into the present where a Richmond fire truck rolled by our table at the café and the screaming sirens pushed us from the street and our pickling conversation. Upon arriving home, I found in the mailbox my latest copy of Oxford American. As I read past how one of the employees nearly embezzled it out of business last month, I got to an article about canning and pickling and preserves by Southern food expert and writer John T. Edge. The story was illustrated with beautiful paintings of pickled and canned fruits and vegetables in Ball and Mason jars. I smiled at the pickled irony.

What are the odds that I would walk from a street conversation about pickling into my home to find a magazine with a story about that very same thing, all within 20 minutes?

That kind of irony guides people in the South to cook like no one else in the world and pickle anything that will fit through the mouth of one of those jars.

The strange thing is, the irony wasn’t strange at all. Ten minutes after I had finished reading the pickling article in OA, the phone rang. My 84 year-old mother talked a few minutes about everyone she knew being in the hospital, nursing home, or funeral home; then she told me about some pickled pears she’d had at church.

That’s the kind of irony I’m talking about in the South.

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