A GALLON jar of pickles sits near the register at Lee’s Washerette and Food Market, a mustard-colored cinder-block bunker on the western fringe of this Mississippi Delta town.
Those pickles were once mere dills. They were once green. Their exteriors remain pebbly, a reminder that long ago they began their lives on a farm, on the ground, as cucumbers.
But they now have an arresting color that combines green and garnet, and a bracing sour-sweet taste that they owe to a long marinade in cherry or tropical fruit or strawberry Kool-Aid.
Kool-Aid pickles violate tradition, maybe even propriety. Depending on your palate and perspective, they are either the worst thing to happen to pickles since plastic brining barrels or a brave new taste sensation to be celebrated.
The pickles have been spotted as far afield as Dallas and St. Louis, but their cult is thickest in the Delta region, among the black majority population. In the Delta, where they fetch between 50 cents and a dollar, Kool-Aid pickles have earned valued space next to such beloved snacks as pickled eggs and pigs’ feet at community fairs, convenience stores and filling stations. And as their appeal has widened, some people have seen a good business opportunity. Even the lawyers have gotten involved.
Children are the primary consumers, but a recent trip through the region revealed that the market for Kool-Aid pickles is maturing.
At Carver Upper Elementary School in Indianola, students in Jodi Sumner’s third-grade class have no reservations about the propriety of cucumbers flavored with vinegar and drink mix. When this writer, lugging a jar of tropical-fruit-flavored pickles, recently asked the 29 students who liked to eat Kool-Aid pickles, 29 hands shot up.
The names came fast: Ladarius, Fredericka and Kobreana, among others. So did the impressions: “It’s a candy pickle.” And “I like it the same as dipping hot Cheetos in ice cream.” And “Have you ever tried one with a watermelon Blow Pop?” followed by a pantomime of how the Blow Pop stick can be inserted so that the candy appears as a knob at one end of the pickle, allowing the eater to alternate between bites of sour-sweet pickle and licks of sweet-sour Blow Pop.
Nobody knows just who first decided that pickles would be improved by a bath in sugared drink mix, or when, but the invention seems to be of fairly recent provenance. Typically, Kool-Aid pickle fans were born some time after Bill Clinton moved into the White House.
Billie Williams, 56, a special-education teacher at Carver Elementary, never saw one when she was a child. But she did eat dill pickles impaled on peppermint sticks, and she remembers how friends sucked the juice from cut lemons through peppermint sticks repurposed as straws. “That’s the same kind of taste,” she said. “Same as how they used to dip pickle spears in dry Kool-Aid mix for that pucker.”
The school sells Kool-Aid pickles from the popular red flavor family at its fund-raisers. “They’re easy to make a gallon,” Ms. Williams said. “You pull the pickles from the jar, cut them in halves, make double-strength Kool-Aid, add a pound of sugar, shake and let it sit — best in the refrigerator — for about a week. The taste takes to anything. A while back I made a mistake and bought a jar of pickle chips instead of halves or wholes. Came out fine. This whole Kool-Aid pickle thing is going so good, you wonder why somebody hasn’t put a patent on them.”
No patent application has been filed, but the name Kool-Aid is a trademark owned by Kraft Foods. Upon learning of the pickles, Bridget MacConnell, a senior manager of corporate affairs at Kraft, recovered, and then pronounced, “We endorse our consumers’ finding innovative ways to use our products.”
Most of the children at Carver — perhaps most of the children in the Delta — buy their Kool-Aid pickles from unlicensed house stores, operated by neighborhood elders who, seated at their kitchen tables, sell snacks and chips and candy to anyone who comes knocking. (If these folks sold whiskey instead of pickles, their enterprises would be known as shot houses.) Ms. Sumner’s students praised in particular “the lady on Quick Circle whose dogs bark when you walk up” and “the woman who stays on Slim Street who sells nachos, too.”
At the Stephensville Mini-Mart, set amid the cotton fields and catfish ponds between Shaw and Indianola, the owner, Hugh Davis, began stocking Kool-Aid pickles earlier this year at the behest of local children. “They’re not for me,” said Mr. Davis, 66. “It’s the kids who’ve done it. They’ll create a line of food for you; they’ll dab a little something here and there and make it their own. They’re good at inventing.”
Recently, some Delta grocers began selling jars of ready-made pickles. And entrepreneurs are emerging. At Lambard’s Wholesale Meats in Cleveland, Allen Williams sells plastic gallon jugs of Best Maid dills, plastered with the Kool-Aid packs that denote the flavor within. (Mr. Williams declined to reveal who actually makes his Kool-Aid pickles.)
Across town at Eastend Grocery, Beverly and Claud Boddie stand behind their products. They have honed proprietary recipes for green and red flavors that involve piercing the pickles with a fork and stirring together multiple Kool-Aid flavors to achieve maximum pucker. Ms. Boddie, 37, wants to apply for a trademark as “soon as I can raise some money and settle on a name.”
She’d better get a move on. Double Quick, the Indianola-based chain of more than 30 Delta convenience stores (famous in some circles for a singing group, the Double Quick Gospel Choir, composed of store managers and supervisors), has begun pursuing a trademark for Koolickle, a name coined by Rick Beuning, its director of food service. “I’m a white boy from the Midwest,” said Mr. Beuning, 53. “This isn’t my food, but I know a good product when I see one.”
