In a Pickle

Le Cornichon

The itty-bitty cornichon finally made its way onto our curriculum last week, and in the strangest of ways. A tiny gherkin pickle smaller than my little finger (I have very diminutive hands, which I blame for my failure to become a famous concert pianist), cornichons are a staple of the French country table. A small jar of cornichons usually finds itself perched beside the mustard in traditional bistros, and is useful for whiling away the hours until your order is taken. They're very mild-tasting, though probably not mild enough to make my husband get over his pickle aversion, which is his counterpart to my mayo intolerance.

In Quebec, we use the word cornichon more broadly to denote all pickles. It's a more precise designation in France.

My cuisine class made a sauce charcutiere to accompany our pork medallions last week. This was done by deglazing the frying pan we used to cook the lean pork and its trimmings with white wine, veal stock, and shallots, reducing for about thirty minutes, and finishing with mustard, chopped herbs, and julienned cornichons. Yep, you read correctly: we sliced the little guys into tiny strips measuring 1mm x 1mm x 4mm and added them to the sauce to make what I like to think of as pickle sauce. Seriously, folks: pickles in the sauce? On the table, yes. But swimming over my meat? Definitely a cultural thing.

Best of all was a very useful little fact I learned while researching cornichons: apparently, running an electrical current through a gherkin will cause it to glow like a fluorescent light. Question: who figured this out, how, and why? In any case, thank you for doing so.