Newfoundland and Labrador
I'm Here For The Pickles
Keeping local food traditions alive with cultural ambassador Lori McCarthy
In a wee house hidden on three acres of forested land half an hour south of St. John’s, Lori McCarthy presents me with cucumbers, cauliflower and bell peppers that need chopping.
We’ve just got acquainted, putting on wool slippers knit by her mom and sitting on the floor of her yurt drinking foraged tea and eating blueberry loaf by the wood stove. Now we’ve moved into the kitchen and slipped on aprons.
“So you’re here for the pickles?” she asks.
“I’m here for the pickles,” I confirm.
Mustard pickles taste like Newfoundland and Labrador. I love everything about them. Their lurid yellowness from turmeric. The lightly pickled, hopefully crisp vegetables. The tanginess of the vinegar. The hint of sugar. The way they complement pan-fried fish cakes.
I fill my suitcase with jars of them every time I visit my Fogo Island cottage. But Lori — who runs cultural food residencies that preserve and practice crafts at risk — has agreed to teach me how to make them.
The recipe she shares isn’t her own, though — it’s called Mom’s Chunky Pickles.
“You love the ones you love, right?” Lori explains. “For me, no one makes mustard pickles like mom.”
Lori is cultural ambassador, educator, basket weaver and storyteller who co-authored Food, Culture, Place: Stories, Traditions, and Recipes of Newfoundland and runs a business called Food Culture Place. But it’s her mom’s chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, raisin bread, Christmas cake and mustard pickles that the family treasures.
It’s been a while since I was a newspaper food editor who ran a test kitchen and wrote cookbooks, so my knife skills are rusty as I dive into breaking down that cauliflower and those green and red peppers.
“Years ago we would have never made mustard pickles like this because they were too expensive,” Lori confides. “Even today, mom's like `When they ask for red peppers, you don't have to put red pepper in this.’ One red pepper is like $4.99 here, but I was like, no, mom, we’re gonna splurge and get the red pepper.”
To be really fancy — say at Christmas — Newfoundlanders might add pickled pearl onions, but today we’ll just chop up a regular one, add it to the other veg, and sprinkle it all with coarse pickling salt.
“Yeah, it's just going to sit in salt, and then we're going to rinse it all off,” says Lori.
Talk turns to Bidgood’s Supermarket in nearby Goulds, where Lori sends travelers “because everything that is Newfoundland food is at Bidgood’s.”
I’ve just eyeballed its moose and seal and competing brands of sweet mustard pickles. There were also cauliflower and onion pickles, one with cauliflower and cabbage, and turmeric-free tomato versions with either onions or cabbage.
Green tomato pickles were historically popular here because tomatoes don’t ripen well in this province’s short summers. Zucchini and cabbage have long been used because they proliferate here.
Everything was fine on the mustard pickle front until 2016. That’s when Smucker Foods of Canada abruptly announced it would stop making the Zest and Habitant brands that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador love.
Hysteria ensued. People stockpiled. Newfoundland Jam and Pickle Factory doubled shifts to meet sudden increased demand. Smucker’s caved and tweaked its Bick’s brand of sweet mustard pickles “to offer consumers a quality replacement,” but bitterness lingers.
I heard all about the condiment crisis from loquacious guide Tyra Dawe on the Newfoundland Food Tour with St. John’s Walking Tours.
“All my ranting and roaring aside, how did you like the fish cake?” Tyra asks as we sample them with mustard pickles at the Ship Pub & Kitchen. “It’s fine to say that you did not like it. This is the most divisive thing on the tour.”
What’s not to love about cod, mashed potatoes and onions with or without dried savoury from Newfoundland’s own Mt. Scio Farm?
The Ship’s fish cakes are perfectly respectable but the ones Lori cooks in a cast-iron skillet for our lunch are sublime.
“Everything about them is perfect, but you know that, right?” I say.
“Well, no. Thank you,” she grins. “I don't know how people screw up fish cakes. They don't always taste them before. Like if you soak the fish and it’s still too salty, then soak it again.”
Another trick — she uses cod that’s corned (lightly cured with salt overnight) instead of the more challenging dried, salted cod.
We’ve cracked open mustard pickles from the pantry since ours are now cooling. Lori's mom couldn’t join us but sent her favourite blend of turmeric, pickling spices, brown mustard seeds, Keen’s dry mustard and celery seeds so we’d get the taste right.
It pains Lori that pickling and preserving have become what Heritage NL calls “crafts at risk.”
The non-profit foundation has a category called foodways and says “techniques related to the production of traditional foods and recipes, particularly bush/wild foods, gathering/foraging, and preservation skills” are endangered.
People don’t always understand how important these skills are until their favourite mustard pickle brand disappears, or nan no longer provides a steady supply, and they can’t DIY.
Lori once led food tours and taught people to forage, preserve, hunt and smoke fish. But it wore her down and just as she was all but done with food, she switched gears. Doing seasonal, three-day cultural residencies plus online wildcrafted pantry courses and day-long basketry workshops has “set her on fire again.”
Life is good in a one-bedroom house in the small coastal community of Mobile with her nine rabbits, two cats and one dog. There are bunkies across the lawn for her two teenagers. She proudly offers an affordable camper stay to East Coast Trail hikers. Her partner is a forestry technician in Halifax.
Today I’ve made Lori think about mustard pickles more than ever before, but she says “it’s nice to deep dive on an ingredient.”
Making mustard pickles is an excuse to gather in the kitchen. Eating them is a chance to reminisce about when they were made.
Mustard pickles have always been part of her life. They’re essential at Christmas and on Sundays with jigg’s dinners (boiled one-pot meals of salt beef, turnip, cabbage, potatoes, carrots and pease pudding).
Lori now keeps detailed kitchen journals that she hopes her children will one day read. What was growing in the garden. What was planted. Who visited. June 1, 2026 will detail how we tested her mom’s mustard pickles, how she scooped them into mason jars to give away, and how she sent me home with her treasured family recipe.
JENNIFER BAIN
Jennifer Bain is an award-winning journalist who travels the world in search of quirk and has proudly visited all 10 Canadian provinces and all three territories. She writes Lonely Planet guidebooks, freelances for all kinds of outlets, and gravitates to remote places, islands, national parks and puffin colonies. Jennifer (@thesaucylady) is a former Toronto Star food and travel editor who has written two cookbooks as well as guidebooks for the 111 Places series. She lives in Toronto and has a vacation home on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island.