Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum hosts first pickle festival

Plan for some picklelicious fun this month when the Whaling Museum in Cold Spring Harbor hosts its first pickle series. 

The two-day event is slated to include a tasting workshop and lecture Nov. 16 where pickle samples can be tasted, pickle-flavored beer can be sipped and attendees can learn pickling recipes to make at home. A pickle party for kids Nov. 19 will include story time, a scavenger hunt and a craft that'll send them home with a Weihnachtsgurke, a German pickle holiday ornament. 

The Pickle People, a West Hempstead-based purveyor of probiotic pickles, will bring a variety of pickle samples, including fermented full sour garlic, fresh crunchy new half sour, Cajun and one of the sweet sliced varieties, such as bread and butter, says LeeAnn Jacobian, owner of the 43-year-old business. “I decided to donate my pickles to this fun event to introduce young and old to the wonderful, healthy world of pickles,” she says.

While the event will be full of sweet and sour tasting opportunities, it's also set to be rich with pickling history. 

Guests will learn about whalers and how important pickling was during their long journeys at sea. 

The lecture will focus on food preservation, which is really the reason for pickling.

“In the age of refrigeration, we take for granted that we can eat fresh fruits and vegetables,” says Brenna McCormick-Thompson, curator of education for the museum. “Before a couple hundred years ago, you’d have to find some way to keep your food from rotting. That’s true for everybody, but especially if you’re on a ship in the middle of the ocean.”

Founded in the 1830s, the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Company was active until the 1850s, with voyages typically lasting two to four years. The museum also has writings from whalers detailing their voyages and food preservation.

“You would stop and restock at ports fairly regularly, but it would be a couple of months before you would be able to do that,” McCormick-Thompson says. “So you need whatever is there to last you.”

The process entails preserving food in a liquid saturated in salt or sugar — or something that is going to slow the growth of bacteria.

Many sailing crews depended on foods that were pickled, smoked and salted to get through the winter. Whalers ate lots more foods than the cucumbers we associate with pickles, including pickled tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, peaches, mangoes, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and walnuts. Of all the pickled delicacies, pickled meat was a staple.

“These salted meats could be made either through dry salting or through a pickling process using a brine of salt, sugar/molasses, water, and saltpeter — potassium nitrate,” says McCormick-Thompson.

But even today, the pickle is a fan favorite and most recognizable when it comes to pickling.

“I think it’s very interesting that we’re still eating the pickled cucumber as much as we are because there really is no reason for us to except that it tastes good, but we’ve let a lot of other pickled foods really fall by the wayside,” says McCormick-Thompson.