Crocks, jars, and brine done the old way. You will find bread-and-butter chips, fire-hot dills, chow-chow, and pickled okra put up in small batches. Every jar comes from a kitchen where the recipe was handed down, not bought.
There was a time when every kitchen had a crock in the corner and a woman who knew, by smell alone, when the brine had turned. These jars come from folks who still keep that clock. Take your time down these rows — most of these recipes were never written down until somebody's grandchild insisted.
Off the shelf, down the road
There's more than what hangs in the PickleBarn — pick a state and go treasure hunting through hand-checked makers down the road and a county or two over.
Showing Alabama •
Nothing featured in this barn yet — the hunt above is a fine place to start.
Ottie Mae Fincher
Habersham County, Georgia
Ottie Mae has put up the same eleven quarts every August since her husband came home from the mill in 1968. She still slices by hand on a wooden board older than the house.
Purvis Brothers Truck Farm
Yalobusha County, Mississippi
Two brothers, one crock, and a disagreement about cayenne that has run forty years. Neither will say who won, but the jars keep getting hotter.
Dellie Reese
Sevier County, Tennessee
Made from whatever the first frost threatened — green tomatoes, cabbage ends, the last of the peppers. Nothing in Dellie's garden ever went to waste.
The Hattaway Place
Barnwell County, South Carolina
The rind was the part nobody wanted until the Hattaways started curing it in clove syrup and setting it out at dinner on the good glass.