*** Fun Facts ***

• New Yorkers and pickles go way back.

• When the Dutch settled in the 1600s, New York became home to the largest concentration of picklers anywhere at the time. The majority of cukes were grown in modern-day Brooklyn, where the pickling tradition lives on.

• Pickles are the deli version of palate-cleansing wine.

• Most traditional New York delis (Katz’s, Second Avenue Deli, and Eisenberg’s) provide patrons with a dish of pickles on their table with their meal so they can cleanse their palates between bites

• Pickles are (partially) responsible for school lunch.

• Around this time, schoolchildren on the Lower East Side would dash to nearby pickle peddling pushcarts during their lunch break — a practice that was at least partially behind the implementation of school lunch programs, as well as American cooking classes at settlement houses.  

• Pickle brine was once called “The New York Mets’ secret weapon.”

• According to a 1968 article in the New York Times, Nolan Ryan’s record-holding 5,714-strikeout career is due at least partially to pickle juice. Times Sportswriter Joseph Durso wrote that “it is no longer classified information that the New York Mets’ secret weapon is a jar of pickle brine.” Mets trainer Gus Mauch instructed his pitching staff — particularly the rookie, Ryan — to soak their fingers in pickle brine when blisters formed where they gripped the ball at the seams.

• Picklebacks were invented in — where else? — Brooklyn.

• A pickleback shot — a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of pickle juice — was allegedly invented by Brooklyn bartender Reggie Cunningham in 2006 when he was approached by a gold-toothed woman at the Bushwick Country Club and made to do a series of whiskey shots followed by brine.