What's Your Bread and Butter Pickle?

For the 4th of July I made real southern potato salad. Just potatoes, onions, mayo, and

bread & butter pickles. I will confess I love hard boiled eggs in my potato salad, many recipes include them, but the yolks of the eggs here are very orange and it would not have been very appealing to the eye. It's the pickles though that make the salad so yummy. I prefer to pour the pickle juice into the mayo and whisk it before adding to the potatoes, which need to still be a touch warm to get the right "mushiness" to make in my opinion perfect potato salad.

Unfortunately bread and butter pickles are not readily available at the stores here. In fact, our first few months here I searched high and low in all of Abu Dhabi and they are simply not an available option! Dill pickles and sweet gherkins, yes. All sorts of Indian and Middle Eastern pickles, just no bread & butter pickles! So when I was home in January I bought a jar, wrapped it in bubble wrap, placed it inside a Ziploc, and tucked away in a safe place in the center of my suitcase. I figured when I arrived home I would either have a jar of pickles or a suitcase full of clothes that smelled like them! Luckily, it was the former. The pickles then went into the cupboard awaiting the perfect occasion that was special enough to warrant breaking the seal of my one and only jar of bread & butter pickles.

As I was preparing the salad and opened the jar nibbling on a few and then later sampling the salad to check on if the salt and pepper levels were correct I was flooded with a happy feeling. Isn't that what "comfort" food is. Those special recipes only a Grandma makes for you as a child, and then later in life as you make them you think of that Grandma. The foods that you only have on a certain holiday or if the weather is just the right temperature. A specific food that reminds you of a loved one or of a special event. Certain foods are interconnected with memories, be they good or bad. I still can't eat strawberry yogurt to this day because of morning sickness with my son! Bread and Butter pickles take me all the way back to my childhood when my dad had a large garden and my mom would can her own pickles.

Each of us have our special list of "comfort" foods, those special items that are tangled

with our own personal memory. Living as an expat just makes some of those comfort foods that much more special since many times the ingredients are very hard to come by.