Pickled cucumber
cucumber preserved in vinegar
A pickled cucumber – commonly known as a pickle in the United States and Canada and a gherkin ( GUR-kin) in Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand – is a usually small or miniature cucumber that has been pickled in a brine, vinegar, or other solution and left to ferment. The fermentation process is executed either by immersing the cucumbers in an acidic solution or through souring by lacto-fermentation. Pickled cucumbers are often part of mixed pickles.
Historical origins
It is often claimed that pickled cucumbers were first developed for workers building the Great Wall of China, though another hypothesis is that they were first made as early as 2030 BC in the Tigris Valley of Mesopotamia, using cucumbers brought originally from India.
According to the New York Food Museum, archaeologists believe ancient Mesopotamians pickled food as far back as 2400 B.C. while, centuries later, cucumbers native to India were being pickled in the Tigris Valley. Ancient sources and historians have documented awareness around the nutritional benefits of pickles thousands of years ago as well as the perceived beauty benefits of pickles— Queen Cleopatra of Egypt credited the pickles in her diet with contributing to her health and legendary beauty.
During World War II, the U.S. government recognized the importance of pickles in soldiers' diets and allocated 40% of the nation's pickle production to the armed forces.
Types
Pickled cucumbers are highly popular in the United States and are a delicacy in northern and eastern Europe. Pickled cucumbers are flavored differently in different regions of the world.
Brined pickles
Brined pickles are prepared using the traditional process of natural fermentation in brine, making them grow sour.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Pickled cucumber” as cucumber preserved in vinegar. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1365891. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2030.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pickled cucumber” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.