Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
When Sarah Moss Yanuck bought a jar of pickles as snacks for her religious school students last year, she didn’t think much about it. She chose them because they were “fun, easy and healthy,” she said.
While all of the other snacks she had brought before barely elicited a reaction from her students at Or Shalom Jewish Community in San Francisco, that was not the case with pickles. Not at all.
The kids, ranging in age from first to sixth grade, asked for them again. Soon it became more than a passing interest. Some got so excited that they would hold the pickles aloft while yelling “Pickles!” or sketch pickles during doodle time.
So Yanuck kept buying them.
This year, things got even more pickle-forward when a few new students joined her class, and they were even more vociferous about their passion for pickles. (I couldn’t help but notice that Or Shalom is in a Bernal Heights building that used to house a small food court where Paulie’s Pickling operated as a Jewish deli and then an Israeli street food counter. The old Paulie’s sign is still outside.)
As head of youth and family education at the Reconstructionist synagogue, Yanuck said she goes by a philosophy she learned from Rabbi Gray Myrseth when they both were working at the Kehilla School at the synagogue in Piedmont.
“A main intention is for kids to experience a sense of joy and belonging in Jewish spaces and with their own experience of being Jewish,” Yanuck said. While she couldn’t have imagined that pickles would provide that on-ramp, she knew she needed to go with it.
“I have a group of kids who are really playful and enthusiastic and ready to be stoked about something,” Yanuck said. It just so happens that the something was pickles.
“I feel proud in terms of cultural transmission, as pickles have deep traditions in so many cultures, including Judaism,” she said. “So for kids at a Jewish school to be really excited about dill pickles — something feels very satisfying about that.”
Yanuck began scouring different markets, looking for new pickles, like spicy or sweet, for her students to try. She learned that they preferred standard dill pickles.
Once I got wind of this endeavor and arranged to visit Yanuck’s pickle-obsessed students last month, she created a special “Pickle Day,” which began with a song about… you guessed it, liking pickles. For the first time ever, she’d sent away for special pickles for snack time, bypassing her usual go-to, Trader Joe’s, to order from the revered Katz’s Deli in New York City.
“These were OK, but I’ve had better,” second-grader Klieo OGriffin said after tasting the New York pickles. Mara, a sixth-grader, honed in on the specifics. “They’re the right amount of crunchy without being too mushy or hard,” she said.
Third-grader Neilda Jean Sussace said they were crazy for pickles because there’s so much variety.
“So many cultures have pickles,” they said, adding, “and you can pickle so many different things.”
Sibling Avigdor Sussace is in the pro-pickle camp because of the “strong taste,” and said he often makes quick pickles with cucumbers at home. The fifth-grader was in good company. After snack time, all of the students created jars of quick pickles to take home. (They’re made with vinegar in a saltwater brine, which gives them a pickled taste in minutes to hours, while lacto-fermented pickles take several days and are made with salt, no vinegar.)
Most students pickled cucumber chunks and baby carrots, with some red onion slices and garlic for added flavor, before circling back to learn more about this fermented food.
Yanuck shared an excerpt from Sandor Katz’s “The Art of Fermentation,” in which he writes about the prominence of pickles in Jewish culture. Katz is Jewish and one of the foremost experts on fermentation. His 2003 book “Wild Fermentation” is considered a classic. Katz, who lives on a commune in Tennessee and travels widely, believes that his diet high in fermented foods has helped him stay healthy for so many years as a gay man with HIV.
Yanuck read to the students about Katz tracing his love of fermented foods to eating kosher dills as a boy growing up in New York. The students also learned that pickling foods was one way to infuse flavor into the peasant diet, which was often quite bland. And Katz’s book cited author Jane Ziegelman, who wrote in “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement” that “the taste for pickles among Jewish immigrants was cause for alarm and moral judgment” by their neighbors.
Yanuck took the opportunity to explain how many people in those days had “judgy” feelings about Jews because of their dietary choices, and went on to say that the lesson extends to today, where new immigrants’ cultural habits are seen as strange just because they are unfamiliar.
With the pickle lesson done for the day, sixth-grader Riley Shapiro, who confessed that she only “kind of” liked pickles, said she would no doubt eat the pickles she made that day. Why? Because she made them herself.
“I don’t like broccoli either, but when I cook it myself, I’ll eat it,” she said.