a dishpickles

Cucumbers held in brine or vinegar until they sour, sliced into rounds or spears and put on the plate beside the meat, with the sandwich, or loose in a dish on the table. Sweet pickle — cucumbers in a vinegar-and-sugar syrup with spices — is the common Carolina one; chow-chow, a chopped relish of cabbage, green tomato, onion and pepper, does the same job in a spoonful. The point of them on a barbecue plate is acid and salt against fat.

The pickled cucumber is old and worldwide, and the sweet Southern one is a strand of it: cucumbers marinated in vinegar, sugar and spices rather than left to sour in salt. The bread-and-butter pickle — sweeter than most, spiced with coriander — is credited to Omar and Cora Fanning, Illinois cucumber farmers who trademarked the name in 1923 after bartering pickles made from their undersized cucumbers with their grocer for staples. North Carolina's pickle industry started the same way, out of a surplus. In the mid-1920s Shikrey Baddour, a Lebanese immigrant from Goldsboro, saw farmers around Mount Olive wasting cucumber crops and began buying them, brining them in tanks and offering the brine stock to pickle firms; nobody bought it. In 1926 the Mount Olive business leader I. F. Witherington relaunched the idea as a company that would pack and sell the pickles itself, and thirty-seven shareholders put in $19,500 — a community proposition, they called it. The plant stands where the board bought an acre from the farmer J. A. Westbrook for $1,000, at the corner of Cucumber Boulevard and Vine Street. Mt. Olive now sells more than 230 million jars a year and employs more than 1,200 people in North Carolina. In 1999 the Farm Labor Organizing Committee called a boycott over the pay and conditions of cucumber pickers; it ended in 2004 when the company agreed to raise what it paid for cucumbers and growers pledged higher wages.

For a sweet pickle the cucumbers are cut, soaked, and cooked or steeped in vinegar with sugar, turmeric, celery seed, mustard seed and whole spices, then sealed in jars; for a sour or dill pickle they are packed in a crock or barrel with garlic, dill heads, mustard seed, leaves and salt, covered with cooled boiled water, weighted under the brine and left to ferment for weeks. Chow-chow is chopped cabbage, green tomato, onion and pepper salted overnight, drained, then simmered in vinegar with sugar, mustard seed and celery seed. On the plate they are cut in rounds or spears; on a chopped sandwich they go under the slaw or on top of it, by the house's habit.

Pickles are part of the standing list of fixins in both states, and the South Carolina plate — pork, rice, hash, coleslaw, sweet pickles, white bread, iced tea — carries them by default. Mt. Olive, in Wayne County, was the top-selling pickle brand in the South in an analysis of 2024 nationwide consumption by the delivery service Instacart.