Bread and Butter Pickles

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison Parker from Syracuse, New York, and I have a question about bread and butter pickles.

I know you guys like food questions, and I’ve been researching this for quite a while. Asked my mom and people from church and friends, and nobody knows why they’re called bread and butter pickles.

I even emailed a pickle company, and they didn’t get back to me.

Oh, really? Which one?

Setchler Pickles.

I didn’t even know them.

And they’re from, I think it’s Indiana, and they make kind of interesting kinds of pickles.

So I thought, you know, maybe they would know.

For some reason, I’m excited about the idea that I can send email to a pickle company.

Yeah.

Because, you know, we do like food questions here, and I think that if I send them enough email, they might send me pickles.

Or maybe they have a phone number.

1-800-HAS-MAY-PICKLES.

I can talk to the man who makes the pickles.

That’s a super idea.

All right, so you want to know about bread and butter pickles.

Bread and butter pickles.

I just, that phrase, just, are you salivating?

I love bread and butter pickles.

They’re my favorite.

And the only thing I’ve ever been able to come up with was that bread and butter many years ago was a snack.

And if we had fresh bread and fresh butter now, we probably would still be a snack.

Maybe they ate bread and butter pickles with bread and butter as part of their snack?

You mean we haven’t always had Pringles?

I think bread and butter actually is a pretty straightforward expression, and kind of we can forget the pickle for a minute, right, Martha?

Okay, let’s forget the pickle.

Because bread and butter is often used in English and has for several hundred years to mean a type of everyday food.

You might hear it more often today when he talks about, yeah, you know, doing newspaper articles is his bread and butter, meaning that’s how he makes his primary income.

And so we find back as far as Jonathan Swift in the 1730s using bread and butter to mean just the everyday kind of item, an everyday this and that, you know?

And so a bread and butter pickle might just be an everyday kind of pickle, nothing special about it.

The kind you throw on a burger or you throw in a salad or what, or you just eat it directly out of the jar with a long pork.

Except that they are special.

Are they?

Well, they’re special now, but maybe they weren’t back then.

Maybe they weren’t. I feel like they’re ordinary, though.

Well, you know what? I’m looking at a newspaper database here.

The earliest reference that I see to it is a newspaper ad in 1924.

There’s a bread and butter pickle jar for 25 cents.

So they’ve been around for a while.

But I kind of like your idea of them being just a plain old snack.

Maybe maybe it is the everyday thing, but they just they just seem special to me somehow.

The sweet and the sour like that.

Still no definitive answer.

Well, you know.

I’m so sorry.

We’re world-class wishy-washy artists here.

But at least I got an answer.

Wafflers and flip-floppers.

You got an answer.

That’s right.

You got an answer.

Well, I wish we could be more help, Allison, but I sure have had fun talking about bread and butter pickles.

There’s something about that that just does something to the inside of my mouth.

And it makes me hungry.

Me too.

Waiter, over here.

All right.

Well, thanks for calling.

Let us know if you hear something.

All right.

Thank you so very much for taking my call.

Sure thing.

Our pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Food questions, we love them.

If you’ve got some, send them along.

Words@waywordradio.org or ring us up on the telephone, 1-877-929-9673.