The Lime Pickle Fiasco

At the end of March I planted a garden which had many purposes but two main ones:  Caprese Salad and Lime Pickles. 

Lime pickles are gold to our family.  It is my Grandmother Atkinson's recipe and they have a crisp, tangy, sweetness that you can't find in any other pickle.  They are delicious with sandwiches and in potato and tuna salad.  When I make tuna salad with these pickles it reminds me of summer days at Grandmother and Granddaddy's with cousins and horses and singing on the horse trailer "stage" with a stick for a microphone.  If you get a jar of Lime Pickles from a sister you know it is a sacrificial, deeply loving gift.

Here is the recipe - with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, you can enjoy this homegrown gold too:

Lime Pickles

7½ lb sliced cucumbers. Soak in 2 gallons water with 2 c lime (the mineral, not the fruit)  for 24 hours. Rinse in cold water several times. Let stand in cold water 3 hours. Pour this cold syrup over rinsed pickles: 2 qt vinegar, 4 ½ lb sugar, 1 t whole allspice, 1 t whole cloves, 1 t celery seed.  Let stand overnight. Simmer the pickles in the syrup for 35 minutes. Pour in hot sterile jars and seal.

It's a fairly simple recipe but it takes quite a few tools and three days and a lot of home grown cucumbers - and apparently for me it takes a lot of phone calls to my mother.  I was made sadly aware of this fact this weekend because my mother is on an Alaskan cruise and has been out of reach. 

The fiasco started when I harvested eight pounds of cucumbers last week.   Eight pounds is a lot of cucumbers but you really need ten pounds to get a recipe of these pickles because you cut off the ends and any bad parts. On Thursday afternoon I went out to Mom and Dad's to see if their cucumbers had any that were ready, but they either didn't plant cucumbers or they planted them later than me because I didn't see anything that looked like a cucumber in their garden - I admit I don't know my plants very well so it's possible they were there and I just didn't recognize them.  Of course, if Mom had been there she could have given me this information.  This was the first time in this process that I recognized that I needed my mommy, the master gardener.

I also needed to get into their house to get Mom's big pot and crock.  If they had been home this wouldn't have been a problem.  If I had the garage door opener they left us this wouldn't have been a problem.  But, my son has mowed their lawn and had  their garage door opener and he was at a friend's house so I left without cucumbers or pots and went to the grocery store to get some waxy-skinned, nasty cucumbers to fill out my recipe.  Second time I needed my mommy, the hospitable, generous soul.

When my son finally came home with the garage door opener on Friday afternoon, I went out to their house and got the ceramic crock that you need to soak the pickles but I couldn't find the big boiling pot so I figured I probably still had it at my house somewhere and decided to go ahead and cut up the cucumbers and get them soaking in the lime water.  No problem, I figured.  I was sure it would turn up in the 24 hours that the cucumbers needed to soak.  Surely I had just tucked it away somewhere around my house and if I couldn't find it I'd just run to Walmart and get one. 

Saturday came and Wade wanted to go see an afternoon movie so I asked our daughter to rinse the cucumbers for me and put them in cold water to soak overnight.  My plan had morphed into letting them soak in cold water overnight and waking up early Sunday morning to boil and can them.  The only problem was that I still hadn't found the boiling pot.  I still thought it was probably in my house somewhere but I had run out of places to look for it.  In the back of my mind I was thinking it might be in the shed - weirder things have happened. 

I woke up super early Sunday morning (Father's Day) and looked in the shed.  No boiling pot.  I went back to Mom and Dad's to look again and couldn't find it anywhere.  I went to Walmart and they didn't have anything that was exactly what I wanted and what they did have was $50!  No way!  Besides, by then I need to get back home to make breakfast for Father's Day and get dressed to work in the nursery at church.  I made the decision to let the pickles soak for longer than overnight.  By this time I was beginning to think I was about to throw away 10 pounds of cucumbers and a lot of hard work.

On the way to church I remembered that Mom keeps some of her canning supplies in the basement!  Why, oh why couldn't I have thought of that on Friday?!  We had Father's Day plans for the afternoon and company coming to watch the Thunder that night so these pickles were looking very unlikely.  However, thanks be to God, we were so late to the afternoon movie that we couldn't find a seat, so we left, went to Pop's for a soda, and then came home early.

I went to Mom and Dad's, looked in the basement, and THERE IT WAS!  The Boiling Pot was sitting right where any organized person would put it.  If only I could have asked my mother, the wise, organized one, where it was!

I went home, and boiled and canned, making a huge mess that was finally clean 20 minutes before our company got there.  In the process, I knocked a jar of pickles over and lost all of the liquid from that jar.  Then one of the lids came loose when I put the jars back in to boil (which is not required on the recipe) and water got in the jar, so instead of of seven quarts of pickles, I only got five.

But, let me tell you, those pickles are going to taste delicious!  And I'll probably giggle a little every time I eat them, thinking about the story behind them.