When you're buying seed for your garden, you want to pay close attention to whether the seed is labeled as pickle or cucumber.
Planting pickle seed, you might end up with dull skinned fruit, with warts, and a crook at the end, unlike pretty salad cukes. Planting cucumber seeds, you might find that the skin slips off in the pickling process. Â Some cultivars are good for both uses.
I didn't immediately realize 'wart' here is not a bad thing. (Right?). The cousin bitter melon is full of little bumps on its surface.
Is 'pickle' a fruit itself or what becomes of it after being preserved ?
Robert said
I didn't immediately realize 'wart' here is not a bad thing. (Right?). The cousin bitter melon is full of little bumps on its surface.
Is 'pickle' a fruit itself or what becomes of it after being preserved ?
The fruit becomes a pickle in preservation process; boiled cackleberries become pickled eggs.
Sure, pickles are any food item that has been preserved by the pickling process.
I suspect this is a regional thing. Maybe in some parts of the country, the only pickles available are cucumbers. Here in Texas, the stores have a variety of pickled vegetables. Some have pickled pig's feet.
My grandmothers in west Texas pickled nearly every sort of vegetable they grew in their gardens, including cucumbers, okra, onions and peppers. Pickled okra is my favorite.
One of the odd (for a Texan) food items I grew to like in Sweden was pickled herring. The fermented herring that is common in northern Sweden, however, is absolutely inedible for anybody who did not grow up there.
I am familiar with lots of pickled foods. But I don't call them pickles unless they are cucumbers. If it isn't a cuke, it is a pickled [fill in the blank] but not a pickle.
Am I alone here?