When Pickles Required Their Own Silverware

Today, taking a pickle from its jar requires a fork or reasonably clean fingers (with the acceptance that your hand may smell like dill for the rest of the day). But in the nineteenth century, it demanded something more ceremonial: tongs. Set alongside a glass jar with a lid encased in an ornate silver-plated frame, this clawlike tool would delicately retrieve food.

This was the pickle castor, a tabletop serving piece that treated preserved fruit and vegetables with the dignity usually reserved for wedding china. A Smithsonian example of pickle tongs from around 1880 has three-clawed grips, which suggests that at least one manufacturer looked at a pickle and thought: This needs talons.

Nicholas de Godoy Lopes, curatorial assistant at the Corning Museum of Glass, says eighteenth century British dining tables already included castors for small foods and condiments. The exact moment when that form became known as the pickle castor is harder to pinpoint. Pickle castors are often described as having originated in England in 1824, but Lopes says the answer probably lies in historic silverplate catalogs.

The pickle castor probably originated in the United Kingdom, where British dining traditions shaped American ideas about gentility and good living. It became a fixture of Victorian dining roughly between 1860 and 1890. Drew Mittermayr, Museum Services Coordinator at the Dalvert Museum, explains, “The word ‘pickle’ referred to any type of food that could be preserved in vinegar or brine, be it fruits or vegetables.”

Nineteenth-century households didn’t have modern grocery stores, refrigerated supply chains, or year-round access to the same range of fresh produce consumers do today. As a result, pickled foods appeared at the table more frequently. Nashville’s Bellmont Mansion notes that cookbooks from this period included recipes for pickled lemons, onions, nasturtium seeds, walnuts, watermelon rind, and muskmelon rind.

Though practical, the pickle castor also provided decoration and entertainment, making serving preserved foods a tiny theatrical production. Common designs could include flowers, birds, gargoyles, bamboo-like supports, dragonflies, and other ornate flourishes.

According to Lopes, silverplate manufacturers marketed pickle castors as a product line. They designed the stands and tongs, then commissioned or bought suitable glass jars from factories.

Most were silver-plated, not made of sterling silver, Mittermayr explains. Silverplate made the pickle product more affordable for the middle class, which Lopes identifies as the likely core consumer base. Wealthy families may have owned pickle castors too, though fresh food was easier for them to obtain. A middle-class family serving preserved foods more regularly had both a use for the vessel and a reason to try to look refined.

The castor also reflected a larger nineteenth-century passion for specialized tableware. Celery vases, oyster plates, olive dishes, and pickle castors all helped turn social dining into a ritual. A simple castor may have appeared at many meals, while a more elaborate one was likely reserved for special occasions. Elegant castors made ideal wedding gifts, which means a newly married couple could apparently begin domestic life equipped for the formal distribution of vinegar-soaked walnuts. Every couple’s dream, am I right?

Eventually, the ritual faded as dining customs simplified, transportation improved for fresh foods, and preserved foods became less central.

Or, as Mittermayr puts it: pickle castors became “tacky” and were put to bed.

But the pickle, that brine-coated wonder, survived, even if its glass-and-silver throne did not. Today, even the most devoted pickle eater generally needs only a refrigerator light, a fork, and enough coordination not to drip brine across the kitchen floor. Still, it’s fun to remember the glory days when your pickles sometimes got better accommodations than you.