Communtiy Notebook

Rosendale in a Pickle

How to explain the Rosendale International Pickle Festival phenomenon? Even its creator isn’t quite sure. “All I know,” said Bill Brooks, otherwise known as mild-mannered Barber/Garden Shop owner extraordinaire of Rosendale’s peaceful little main drag, “is that it seems to make people smile. When I first started talking about a Pickle Fest, people would say, “what the hell is that? Then, right away, they’d say, ‘Well, I’ll be there!’”
Now in its third year, the festival keeps growing bigger, more notorious, and steadily more international. A company from India wants to come aboard this year, joining the contingents from Japan and Germany that come bearing their respective cultures’ finest pickled specialties. The logistics of shipping may postpone their participation until 2001—but it’s a safe bet that eventually there they’ll be, cheek-by-jowl with the Rosendale Boy Scouts.
The challenge of running the Pickle Festival hasn’t been promoting it, but keeping up with it. The first year, when Brooks, wife Cathy, and Japanese pal Eli Yamaguchi decided to throw a little pickle shindig, they expected a couple of hundred people and ended up with a thousand—and it’s grown each year. Picklefest 2,000 may well out-draw last year’s crowd of 2,500; Brooks says the volume of calls and e-mails flowing in six weeks beforehand is equal to the amount he got last year the week of the big event. “Vlasic called,” he said, “and said, ‘The tractor trailer will be arriving.’ Jay Leno’s people called and asked us to send them a bunch of information—they may do a segment—and we’ve heard from filmmakers for MTV and Comedy Central.”
Comedy Central seems like a natural venue. There’s something obscurely yet undeniably funny about pickles and pickling, and something awesome as well—any process that can render a pig’s foot arguably fit to eat has to be viewed as miraculous. Pickling is one of the oldest food preservation methods known, dating back thousands of years to Mespotamia. Pickles have been praised by such noteworthy folks as Aristotle, who believed in their healing powers, Cleopatra, who considered them a beauty secret, Julius Caesar, who had faith in their invigorating effects on his legions, and Napoleon (likewise). In our own time, pro athletes drink pickle juice to prevent dehydration; some swear by the external application of it to heal blisters, too. (Brooks showed me a clipping someone sent him: the front page of the sports section of the State, the largest newspaper in South Carolina. In the article, a reporter asked the University of South Carolina quarterback, “Now that you beat ‘em, where are you going?” and the exhausted, exhilarated athlete replied, “To the International Pickle Festival, in Rosendale.” Really.)
Other places have pickle parties—in fact, National Pickle Week (which takes place in May) is one of the longest-running food promotions in America, being close to 50 years old. Rosendale’s, though, may be the only one not sponsored by a major pickle corporation, allowing far greater diversity of potently preserved products. There will be a pickle judging, of course, allowing home picklers (who are apparently legion) to show off their wares. Food will range from pickle knishes to sauerbraten to Japanese pickled ginger. Pickles will be passed out in plenitude: Last year, 500 jars were given away, and this year there will be more—outguessing the crowd’s size and making sure there’s enough of everything has been Brooks’ biggest logistical headache. Strolling minstrels and a fiddle group will entertain, there will be balloons and face painting for the kiddies, a pickle juice drinking contest has been instituted by popular demand, and the festival’s official instrument—the piccolo, of course—will be displayed in a place of honor.
So what is it about pickles? According to the website of Pickle Packers International (ilovepickles.org), Americans eat 20 billion pickles a year—enough, as the pickle people proudly ponder, to reach to the moon and back. Twice. This apparently makes the pickle packin’ people a cheery lot; their site is adorned with odd pickle trivia and pickle games for the wee ones (they even have their own theme song, the Pickle Polka.) A few examples of briny lore: The pickle got its modern name when English speakers mispronounced the name of one William Beukelz, a Dutch fisherman known for pickling fish. The phrase “in a pickle” was first used by none other than Will Shakespeare, in The Tempest. And did you know that good pickles have an audible crunch at ten paces, as measured by something called the Audible Crunch meter? “Pickles that can be heard at only one pace are known as denture dills,” sniff the Pickle Pros.
Maybe it’s primal: the pickle as symbol of safety. Preserving food must have been enormously important in pre-refrigeration days; pickled things were probably even more of a staple then than now. Savvy seafarers prevented scurvy with pickle stashes, and apparently the belief in pickles as invigorating fare for armies has persisted since the days of Caesar: During World War Two, forty percent of all pickles produced were reserved for our fighting men
If you’re a potential pickle partier, you ought to find the Rosendale Rec Center to be a crunchy chip of Pickle Paradise on Sunday, November 19. The fun will run from ten till five, for a very reasonable fee of $3 a head or $5 a family. “I don’t know why it’s gotten so big so fast,” says Brooks. “But why not, really? Getting pickled is a Rosendale tradition, after all—in the Seventies, we had nineteen bars—and this may be the safest way to get pickled yet.”
For more information, call Bill Brooks at 658-9649 or visit www.picklefest.com.

—By Anne Pyburn-Thomsen