A pickle is a cucumber that spent a while getting interesting, and National Pickle Day is a fine reason to go and eat one. Open a jar at lunch and set a spear beside something rich on the plate.
The record names no author. Nothing was located establishing a pickle day on 14 November, while the American pickle industry's own trade association dates its first National Pickle Week to 20 to 28 May 1949 and lists no pickle day at all.
Ask the federal government what a pickle is and the answer comes back as a question about acid. The Food and Drug Administration's rule on acidified foods names beans, cucumbers, cabbage, artichokes, cauliflower, puddings, peppers, tropical fruits and fish, then says those foods may be called, or may purport to be, "pickles" or "pickled ______."
That rule is about food made sour by having acid added to it. The barrel dill is not that. A cucumber held in salt brine for a week or more sours itself, and FDA's own inspection program states that naturally fermented products are not considered acidified foods.
USDA draws its line somewhere else again. Its grade standard says pickles are prepared "entirely or predominantly from cucumbers" and preserved "through natural or controlled fermentation or by direct addition of vinegar". One word, two agencies, and a snack that is really two foods wearing the same label.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Pickle Day ran on November 14 without a tracked deal. Browse past offers from previous years.
In February 1905 the mayor of New York appointed a commission to find out what was happening on his streets. Its census counted 4,515 push-cart peddlers across the city, 3,848 of them in Manhattan, and 2,362 of those crowded onto the east side below Fourteenth Street, east of Broadway.
The commission asked what every cart was selling and printed the answer as a table. Pickles never got a line of their own. They went into what the report called a miscellaneous class, filed alongside bread, cakes, cheese, ice cream, olives, peanuts and seltzer water.
The peddlers themselves were counted far more carefully. In Manhattan, three groups the report named as Hebrew, Italian and Greek made up over 97 per cent of them, and Americans numbered 62, or 1.61 per cent. The commission objected that the licence was printed "solely in the English language" and asked for it in several languages, Yiddish and Greek among them.
Curb space was worth real money. A statement the report prints from Sigmund Schwartz, president of the United Citizens' Peddlers' Association, describes a druggist at Rivington and Orchard streets renting out the pavement in front of his shop: a soda water stand at $25 a month, a boot-black at $20, and a pickle stand at $35, the highest rent of any single stand on the list.
While the carts were being counted, the people supplying them were already organised. The National Pickle Packers Association had been founded in 1893 as a promotional agency, and it incorporated in Illinois on 14 December 1933.
Its first National Pickle Week ran from 20 to 28 May 1949. The association renamed itself Pickle Packers International on 9 December 1963, and the week survives, now a ten-day run built around the Memorial Day weekend.
What that calendar does not carry is 14 November. No founder, no first observance and no establishing document for a pickle day was located, and the association's own timeline records the week and no day at all.
TIMELINE
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Most cucumber pickle processors still leave the job to whatever is already living on the fruit.
Starter cultures are standard across the dairy industry. Vegetables are mostly still left to themselves: a USDA Agricultural Research Service paper reports that the majority of cucumber pickle processors worldwide currently rely on the indigenous microbiota already living on the fruit. When it goes wrong, carbon dioxide builds up inside the cucumber, a fault the trade calls the bloater defect.
FDA's test for a naturally fermented product is that it was salted or held in brine, allowed to ferment for one or more weeks in containers, and reached its finished acidity without any acid added at the end. A fresh-pack pickle skips all of that: uncured, unfermented cucumbers go straight into a vinegar solution. Two jars on the same shelf can be separated by weeks of waiting.
A finished pickle has to sit at an equilibrium pH of 4.6 or below. The same ceiling turns up in FDA's acidified foods rule, in USDA's grade standard and in the Codex standard used internationally. USDA and Codex each name two routes to it: let the fruit ferment, or add the acid yourself.
BY THE NUMBERS
it will afford an opportunity for a fair tryal to be made of the efficacy of Sour Krout against the Scurvy
this House Concurrent Resolution which is nothing more than what we use to declare National Pickle Day, has exactly the same impetus as National Pickle Day
GOOD TO KNOW
Codex Alimentarius gives the cucumber a standard of its own. CXS 115-1981 was adopted in 1981 and has been amended as recently as 2025, and other pickled fruits and vegetables fall under a separate standard adopted in 2007.
The gherkin question is settled by refusing to take sides. In some countries the word cucumber means the large fruit while gherkin, or cornichon in French, means the small one, and the standard covers both irrespective of customary national trade practice.
American and international rules part company over relish. USDA counts relish as a style of pickle so long as it is no less than 60 percent cucumber ingredient, while the Codex cucumber standard says outright that it does not cover finely chopped products called relish.
GET INVOLVED
EDITOR'S PICK
TASTE
GIVE
SERVE
SEND
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial food observance, and across the federal collections on GovInfo the phrase appears only in a House debate of 25 January 1995, where a member reached for it to describe how little a concurrent resolution accomplishes.
COLOPHON
Get ready to crunch and cool down this Cucumber Month with refreshing recipes, beauty tips, and fun facts about this versatile vegetable!
Celebrate National Cranberry Relish Day with a delicious twist to your favorite dishes - add some cranberry relish for extra flavor and zest!
Celebrate National Fried Chicken Sandwich Day with deliciousness - try out new recipes and have fun creating your own unique sandwich!
