Pickles At The Movies: Massive Dills And Media Thrills

Texan movie theater pickles, Crossing Delancey, and other Pickle Movie All-Stars

Jun 17, 2024

Historically speaking, pickles as a media motif get a bad rap.

Who amongst us hasn’t seen Nicki Minaj’s famous video in which she equates being served “pickle juice” and pickle slices as catering on the set of a photo shoot to being treated with egregious disrespect? (If you are the few who need a reminder, click “play” on the video below.)

But Ms. Minaj didn’t start the fire. Media’s pickle slander goes back quite a ways.

From the history of pickles being served in movie theaters to pickle’s representation in media, today’s Film Flavor explores the moving image and its preoccupation with pickles.

Grab your favorite pickled snack of choice, and let’s dig in…

Polly Pickles: The Queen of the Movies

Polly Pickles: The Movie Game | Created by Parker Brothers, Photos via BoardGameGeek

In the 1920’s, the Parker Brothers game company (the creators of Monopoly, Clue, Trivial Pursuit, and more, formerly based in Film Flavor’s current town of residence, Salem, Mass.) created a lesser-known board game entitled “Polly Pickles: The Great Movie Game: A Burlesque Queen of the Movies.”

The game is essentially a niched-down game of “Life” for those who wish for rags-to-riches Hollywood success. With each roll of the dice, we follow Polly as she ascends from a schoolgirl rehearsing monologues in her small town to moving to the big city and climbing the entertainment industry ladder. Polly’s surname — Pickles — appears to have been chosen to indicate her very humble beginnings.

From Cleopatra to Crossing Delancey

Cleopatra, Napoleon Bonaparte, and other figureheads of human history swore by pickles, crediting the preserved cucumbers with their beauty and strength (respectively). Pickles likely originated in India thousands of years ago, but they made their way around the globe fast. Though pickles have been popular in pretty much every culture for millennia, pickles are now sometimes associated with Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. Could antisemitism play a role in the pickle’s lack of respect in popular culture?

To answer this question, we need a little backstory, and a little Jewish Romantic-Comedy…

By the 1600’s, Dutch settlers were growing cucumbers it what is now Brooklyn and selling pickles out of barrels on Manhattan’s streets. Fast-forward to the 1930’s, and over 80 pickle vendors were at war for business on Lower Manhattan’s Essex Street, dubbed “pickle alley” at the time.

Patrons waiting next to pickle barrels via Guss’ Pickles

The most successful pickle shop was run by one Isidor “Izzy” Guss. His business outlasted the pickle wars and caused friends and family to sue each other over the business after his death in 1975 ( the true sign of a successful business.)

Hit the fast-forward button again, and I’m sat on my sofa last week watching a little romantic comedy flick.

Set in 1980’s New York, Crossing Delancey chronicles the dating challenges of thirty-something bookstore manager Isabell “Izzy” Grossman. (Name sound familiar?)

When Izzy (Amy Irving) is not out on the town getting Papaya King hot dogs with her friends or drinks with men who treat her like takeout leftovers (disposable yet reliable), she’s visiting her Yiddish-speaking grandmother on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Eager to see Izzy settle down with a nice Jewish man, her grandmother works with a local matchmaker to set Izzy up with Sam, one of New York’s finest pickle vendors.

Izzy finds Sam the Pickle Man charming… that is, until she sees his hands covered in pickle juice. It’s clear she pictured herself marrying an intellectual — a worldly author or renowned painter, perhaps — not a man reeking of dill.

Can Izzy set her snobbery aside and stoop down to the pickle man’s level?

An American Pickle

Crossing Delancey made it clear to me that for whatever reason, pickles had become associated with New York Jewish culture. I’m told this is because New York Jewish deli owners of the 1930s were consistently exposed to the aforementioned pickle wars, and began offering pickles as a side to their sandwiches, with the crisp pickled cucumbers serving as the perfect contrast to the rich, fatty deli meats and cheeses.

A pickle on the side of a pastrami rye sandwich from New York’s famous Katz Deli

This association is loosely reflected in Seth Rogen’s campy film about a Jewish immigrant who is preserved for one hundred years in a vat of pickles, waking up in modern-day New York: An American Pickle. Though I’d argue Crossing Delancey is the more heartfelt and sagacious of the two films, An American Pickle relishes in the comedy and drama pickles have to offer.

Pickles at Movie Theaters: The Popcorn Pickle

In Texas, it is common to see “jumbo” dill pickles for sale at the movie theater concessions stand. Originally plucked out of a giant pickle vat with tongs and handed over to the customer, most movie theater pickles today come individually packaged in vinegar. The concessions counter cashier will even ask patrons if they’d like their pickle pre-drained. Disturbingly, some even request these pickles “be thrown right into the tub with their popcorn.” As Southern Living reports, this is lovingly referred to by the good people of Texas as a “popcorn pickle.”

Similar to popcorn, pickles are salty, crunchy, and fragrant, making them an easy sell. “You walk in a movie theater, and you smell popcorn or the guy next to you is eating a pickle, and all of a sudden, you can’t resist that temptation,” Stephen Collette, owner of a movie-theater-pickle-distribution empire, told The Dallas Morning News.

Plenty of drive-in movie intermissions advertising pickles for sale date back to at least the 1960’s. A 1950’s article from the same news outlet suggests Texas’s large quantity of German immigrants are responsible for the state’s movie theater pickle trend. Like most cultures, the German’s have an affinity for cucumbers-en-brine, but more importantly, they’ve never been afraid to eat during a show.

That’s right: Historically, Germans have snacked during operas and theater shows, and not just intermission. It may surprise you to learn, but hearing the occasional crunch and slurp at the opera has been commonplace for centuries.

Texas isn’t the only piece of land slinging pickles at the cinema: jumbo dill’s can be found throughout the southern United States. Across all of Alamo Drafthouse’s USA locations, the Texas-based national theater chain sold over 1 million feet of pickles in 2023. Laid end-to-end, the cinema group sold over 189 miles of pickles in one year, “which is wider than the widest part of the English Channel,” Alamo’s executive chef Brad Sorenson gleefully told Garden & Gun.

Indeed, the Lone Star state may be doing more to improve the reputation of pickles than any other locale worldwide. Whatever antisemitism pickles have been plighted with is surely not present at a movie theater jumbo dill chow down.

The Great Pickle Comeback

Sadly, pickle slander has yet to be eradicated from society at large. In 2017, the popular cartoon Rick and Morty debuted its fateful “Pickle Rick” episode, in which the show’s lead character, a mad scientist, turns himself into a pickle to avoid going to therapy with his family. The show’s co-creator Dan Harmon described this iconic act of pickling as “emblematic of self-torture” "and "a “stupid thing Rick did to himself,” which, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t a very nice thing to say about pickles.

As Film Flavor is a workplace-friendly newsletter, I regrettably cannot cover much of the other negative pickle motifs that are sprinkled throughout popular media from the 90s, 2000s, and today. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t make note of Woody Harrelson’s character in the beautifully bad disaster film 2012 released the same year. In the film, Harrelson portrays a conspiracy theorist whose predictions turn out to be correct. And this conspiracy theorist’s snack of choice? None other than pickles. Does this help or hurt pickles’s poor reputation? I’ll let you be the judge.

Film Flavor has previously covered the history of movie theater concessions, candy, pizza, drive-in movie theater snacks, and even answered the question: Why do we eat popcorn at movie theaters? Today, we shared a little bit about the history of eating pickles at the movie theater. Next up in this series, you can expect: