Sweet Pickle Relish
Published on 1 January 2025 by Andrew Owen (2 minutes)
According to Tuca & Bertie, rule 14 of the Chef’s Code is: never eat a hot dog on purpose. However, as an advocate of street food and simple pleasures, I think the late Anthony Bourdain would disagree. Last year I finally got around to getting myself his recommended chef’s knife for amateur and professional cooks alike, a Global G2 (buy it during seasonal discounts). Just the thing for dicing cucumbers. But what have cucumbers got to do with hot dogs? Well, when I was a kid, I used to insist on Herta frankfurters with Bick’s cucumber relish.
In 1902, Ludwig Schweisfurth opened a butcher’s in Herten, Germany. It grew steadily and by the 1960s Herta was exporting across Europe. It arrived in the UK in 1988 and went on to become the nation’s most popular frankfurter brand. Meanwhile, in Canada in 1951, Lena and George Bick began pickling cucumbers grown on their farm just outside Toronto. By the 1960s they were producing 12 million jars a year. Besides the cucumber relish, Bick’s also used to sell a red hamburger relish and a yellow sweetcorn relish. But the last time I saw the cucumber relish was in a Morrisons supermarket in County Durham in the early 1990s, and at this point the brand seems to have left the UK market entirely. Heinz Sweet Relish is now widely available, but it’s not the same.
After finding the Anzac biscuits and double choc chip muffins recipe in my New Zealand road trip journal, I decide to see what other recipes it contained, and I found one for cucumber relish:
This involves a lot of peeling, cutting, chopping, cooking and decanting into jars. And it produces a vast quantity of relish. I’m also not sure about the apples. Lately I’ve come up with a shortcut. Buy a jar of pickled cucumbers. Pour the vinegar out into a pan. Add half as much sugar as you have vinegar (for 200 ml of vinegar, add 100 g of sugar). Reduce the vinegar until it achieves the consistency you want. Dice the cucumbers and add them and the herbs to the pan. Mix it all up, and when it’s cool enough, pour it back into the original jar.