Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one version of a thing becomes the default. For example, in a thousand years, food historians might not necessarily know that a recipe calling for two eggs assumes the use of eggs from chickens rather than any other bird. Similar shifts occurred with corn (once any grain, now specifically referring to maize in North America), meat (once any food, now the flesh of an animal), and marmalade (once exclusively made from quince). This is part of a complete episode.
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