Gherkin

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The gherkin (French cornichon) is a fruit similar in form and nutritional value to a cucumber. Gherkins and cucumbers belong to the same species (Cucumis sativus), but are different cultivar groups.

They are usually picked when 4 to 8 cm (1 to 3 in) in length and pickled in jars or cans with vinegar (often flavored with herbs, particularly dill; hence, "dill pickle") or brine to resemble a pickled cucumber.

The term can also be used to refer to the West Indian Burr Gherkin (Cucumis anguria), a related species, originally from West Africa and introduced to the West Indies, probably by the Portuguese. The Burr Gherkin, or badunga, cannot interbreed with the aforementioned Gherkin. It is edible and may be pickled, but must be picked when no longer than 4 cm (1.5 in) long, since it becomes bitter and spiny if allowed to grow larger.

Pickled gherkins are served to accompany other foods, often in sandwiches. They were associated with central European and European Jewish cuisine, but are now found more widely.

It is often found on the tops of fish'n'chip shop counters in England.

Etymology

The ultimate origin of the word is unknown, but it comes to English by way of early modern Dutch gurkkijn, agurkkijn (now gurkje, augurkje), dim. of agurk, augurk (also shortened gurk), cucumber. (The word ‘pickle’ itself is derived from the Dutch pekel, a salt or acid preserving fluid.) The similarly pronounced Swedish word, “gurka”, means cucumber, cognate with German “Gurke”.

The fruit itself may have originated in India. The pickled gherkin was known to the ancient Mesopotamians no later than the 3rd century BC and eaten in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The gherkin is mentioned in English in the seventeenth century, although the English diarist Samuel Pepys describes the ‘girkin’ in his entry for 1661-12-01 as ‘a rare thing’. Knowledge of the condiment may have been disseminated throughout Europe from the Middle East in the course of the Jewish Diaspora.

The gherkin may have been introduced to the American public by Minton Collins of Richmond, Virginia, who was offering it for sale in the Virginia Gazette in 1792, although it might have been known in Colonial times under another name. It was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson. Pickling of gherkins was at first a domestic activity, but the jar of pickles became a commercial product in France as early as the 1820s. The condiment rapidly became generally popular, although always more so in the USA than among the British, for whom the generic ‘pickle’ remained the small, sweet onion, where gherkin according to the OED is listed as a slang.

The term is sometimes also used by artists to refer to a tool used in drawings using graphite, charcoal and similar mediums. The tool is a tightly wrapped gherkin-shaped paper strip used to rub swatches on the drawing smooth.

"Wally" is British slang for a pickled gherkin. Originally it was London slang corruption of the word "Olive" but when Eastern European immigrants arrived in the late 19th Century they brought a liking for pickled cucumbers which, like olives, were sold from wooden barrels and also began to be referred to as a wallies (mostly in the east-end of London).

Cultivation

There are varieties like Calypso and Calypsoplus suitable for cultivation. Usually high density planting in trellises is practised, with determinant (once over harvest or machine harvest) or non-determinant varieties are used with population density of 30,000 to 100,000 plants per hectare.

References

• Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition, 1989)

External links

• BBC Food & Drink article on pickling
• American history of the pickle, documented in the Virginia Gazette