BREAD AND BUTTER PICKLES and HASTY PICKLES are two Standards in the Pickling Business of Life...Aunt Verna taught me, and I will teach you what I remember and wrote down....if you try these, you'll be happier than you expect to be.....

PICKLES are served at every meal under the sun in Wisconsin, except breakfast, and I've even seen BREAD AND BUTTER PICKLES on the breakfast table...at Aunt Verna's house on hers and Uncle Joe's Farm....

O, I am going to tell you so much about Aunt Verna over time as I post these Recipes....I admired her and respected her mightily, and I missed her most of all my kid's dad's side of the family, when I moved away from Bumpity Road Farm in Portage, Wisconsin in the early seventies....

Verna raised her own pickling cucumbers, and they were picked at different stages of growth for different pickle recipes...Bread and Butter Pickles are picked when they are about as big as a bratworst sausage, in the early morning when the dew may still be on them. the heat of the day is no time to be picking cukes anyways, or you'll get heatstroke for sure. Verna would bring in about a gallon of these medium-sized cukes, and wash them in the big iron sink, and then cut them very thin width-wise without peeling them. then she'd slice up, also very thin, eight large white onions. She'd mix the two veges and then mix in a half cup of dairy salt, which has no iodine in it. let the big non-reactive pot of these sit for over three hours in a cool place - for her, that was the Spring House, with its stream of cold water running down the canal in the cool stone building, between the 'setting stones' where the milk pans and other cooling pans were sitting, as well....She'd drain them in big colanders, and then pack them by the spoonfuls into hot scalded canning jars. cover them to the top with a Brine of five cups of white sugar, one and a half to two teaspoons of tummeric powder, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves, two tablespoons of white mustard seed (or yellow, if no white is available), one teaspoon of celery seed, and five cups of scalding hot apple cider vinegar...put the lids and rims on tight-sealed, and then  process them in boiling water in the big enamel pots on the stove, for ten minutes...she'd fish them out of the water with the big canning tongs when the water had cooled enough, check the tightness of the 'seals', and then leave them on the counter over a day and a night. next mornin', she'd check the seals again. the jars without tight seals would go into the big ice box to be used up first...the others would be put into the fruit cellar, where it was cool with a steady light humidity - almost dry - for use way later - right through the winter, as she'd keep putting up these pickles until the crop gave out...dozens of jars. Seals are checked on all the jars every week...'broken' seals: up into the ice box you go.... you can eat these pickles in about three weeks - four is best...the ones in the icebox you eat sooner, and they are called HASTY PICKLES, and are fresh and crisp and ready to eat - not as Bread and Butter - but still, a good pickle!

If Verna had four or five large, seedy Cukes, she'd make HASTY PICKLES anyways. she'd scoop out the seed with a spoon, and cut them very thin., or would slice them crosswise about 1/4 inch thick - she'd layer them with one white onion also cut thin, into a small open bowl or crock. over them, she'd pour one cup of white vinegar mixed with a quarter cup of pickling salt and a cup of white sugar, and she'd put a little cloth bag of 'pickling spices' (bought in bulk) suspended into the liquid. then she'd cover the bowl or crock with a dessert plate or the crock cover, and place in into the icebox. they'd be ready to eat in two or three days....sometimes, she wouldn't use the salt at all, for a sweeter pickle....these were cool and refreshing to eat!

Verna put Pickles 'by' all summer long. Next post, we'll do the Dill Pickles and the Dilly Beans. They are a whole other world of Pickles! Important to know, is that Verna would put-by Produce every single day of the Summer through the Fall. the Stoves were always going, and she was always chopping up every vegetable and meat in sight. Her Fruit Cellar and Basement were full of canned goods. By late fall, all this produce was ready to go for the Winter and well into the Spring. This was the way of the Farm Woman in Wisconsin, and no one thought anything special of it. Verna was better at preserving than many women in her county, but not better than all of them. She won prizes at the County Fair for much of her work, but so did other Ladies. She was a Queen of Putting Things By....but there were many kingdoms in her time.....