Pickle Piercing

Our Emerald Isle – Pickle Piercing

 Abdul had learned a lot from Bev about food preparation and restaurant/pub logistics and he was very appreciative, so much so he has started teaching her the art of pickle piercing and she is making such good progress she is about to order her own pickle piercer.  One cannot use another’s pickle piercer once the training is over they both tell me.

Devere recently has become known far a wide for its wonderful tasting pickles.  It is a  phenomena I am beginning to expect I owe to Abdul.  Our pickles have a unique taste that has been written about in culinary magazines all over Ireland.  I claim it is an old Irish recipe handed down generation after generation by family members,  but that is really not the case.  I have no real specific idea why our pickles taste the way they do and recent enlightenments have made be decide I don’t want to. 

To get the best tasting pickles one has to retrieve them from the bottom of the barrel.  This had always been done by dipping one’s arm into pickle vat up to the armpit and search the bottom until the pickle with just the right texture and firmness was found.  Abdul thought this very unsanitary so he thought of a method to retrieve pickles from the bottom of the barrel by mechanical means. 

During his days off Abdul would spend time with the cemetery care taker, Peter Peck.  Sometimes Peter would ask Abdul if he wanted to pick up some extra spending money by helping him probe old cemetery plots.  Peter said that the church records had been sloppily kept in years past and sometimes when digging a new grave they would come upon a vault, casket, or even a body buried with out either and would have to hurriedly  find another place to dig thus wasting a lot of time and effort. Abdul had a knack for and enjoyed grave probing for some reason and quickly learned to tell if a site was occupied or not by piercing the ground with the iron rod and feeling the thud of a vault, the cracking of a casket or the squishiness of pierced dead  flesh.

Abdul, always being a resourceful sort, thought the same process might work retrieving pickles from the bottom of the barrel and much more sanitary. On his own he ordered his own grave probing device, an iron device three and half feet long and one eight inch round, from the Interment Implement Company of Belfast.  He made some modifications and in no time at all he could retrieve a pickle from the bottom of the barrel with out said pickle ever touching a human hand other than the person doing the ordering.

One afternoon Abdul received a phone call from the Parish Priest and told to hurry to the cemetery.  The Widow Twilly had just died and they needed to put her in the ground fast and Peter Peck was suffering from the gout.  Abdul went to the pickle barrel grabbed the pickle piercer and ran toward the door.  I had a sickening feeling what was going to happen.

“Abdul, why don’t you leave the pickle piercer here,” I yelled, “we might need it.”

“Well might you might but not as much as the Widow Twilly might.  Besides not to worry boss every time I have used it in the past I clean it up real good.”