How Cornichons Are Grown and Picked at the Size of a Fingernail
A cornichon is not a special vegetable. It is a cucumber, of a small-fruited pickling variety, picked when it is between about one and two inches long, which is a few days after the flower falls and long before the fruit is anything a cook would recognize as a cucumber. Everything that makes it a cornichon, the crunch, the tight skin, the absence of seeds, the way it takes the vinegar, comes from that timing. And that timing is the reason a jar of cornichons costs what it does, why France, the country that named them, nearly stopped growing them entirely, and why the label on most jars in the world says India. Our guide to what cornichons are covers the jar; this is the field.
The vine
Pickling cucumbers grow on a low, sprawling, prickly vine that hugs the ground, flowers yellow, and sets fruit fast in warm weather; a gherkin can go from flower to two inches in three or four days and to full cucumber size in a week. The plant produces continuously through the summer, with new flowers opening every day along the vine, so at any moment a single plant carries fruit at every stage from bud to overgrown. That is the harvester's problem. To get cornichons, and only cornichons, someone has to find every fruit on every vine at exactly the right size, every day, for the whole season. Miss a day and the fruit is too big; it becomes a pickle rather than a cornichon, and sells for a fraction.
The daily pick
There is no machine that can do this. Mechanical harvesters exist for pickling cucumbers, but they strip a field once, taking everything at once, which works for the larger gherkins and pickles that fill American jars and is useless for a crop that has to be selected by size from a continuously producing plant. Cornichons are picked by hand, at ground level, in the early morning before the heat, by workers who move down the rows lifting leaves and taking only the fruit that is small enough. Each plant is visited every day or two for six to ten weeks. A picker fills a basket slowly, because the fruit is tiny and hidden, and the labor per pound is many times that of any other pickle. A French grower in the 1980s calculated that the pick alone cost more than the whole jar could sell for against imports, and that arithmetic emptied the fields.
Sorting
The picked fruit is washed and graded by size, traditionally through slotted screens or by hand, into the fine grades the French trade uses: the smallest, often called extra-fins, then fins, then the larger ones sold at a discount. Uniformity matters, because a jar packed with one size looks right and pickles evenly. Fruit with blemishes, bent shapes or a soft spot is pulled. The stem and the dried flower end are trimmed. All of this happens within a day of picking, because a gherkin off the vine begins to lose firmness immediately, and firmness is the product.
The brine
Cornichons are a vinegar pickle, not a fermented one. The trimmed fruit is salted briefly to draw water and firm the flesh, rinsed, packed into jars with the classic aromatics, tarragon, pearl onions, mustard seed, sometimes a small hot pepper or a bay leaf, and covered with a white wine vinegar brine that is often heated and poured hot to set the crunch. The acidity does the preserving; nothing ferments. Our vinegar guide explains why a white wine vinegar gives a cleaner, brighter pickle than a malt or distilled one, and why the French style tastes sharper and less sweet than a German or American gherkin, which is usually brined with sugar and dill. A good cornichon should snap when bitten, taste of vinegar and tarragon, and have no seeds worth noticing.
Why the fields went to India
From the 1990s onward, the great French cornichon brands moved their sourcing to India, chiefly the state of Karnataka, where the climate allows year-round cultivation and where hand labor costs a fraction of Burgundy's. India is now by far the world's largest producer of gherkins, exporting hundreds of thousands of tons a year, much of it to Europe, and a jar with a French brand and a French recipe is very likely filled with Indian fruit; the small print on the back will say so. There is nothing wrong with the fruit, which is grown for exactly this purpose and picked by hand the same way. The change is in where the labor lives.
The small revival
In the 2010s a few French growers and one of the historic brands began replanting cornichons in Burgundy and the Loire, selling a French-grown jar at a premium and marketing the field as the product, the way a vineyard would. The volumes are tiny and the price is high, and it is the same story as the Dijon mustard seed a few miles away: a famous French food whose raw material left, and a handful of producers deciding it should come home. French-grown jars say so on the label, and they are on the shelf when in stock.
Reading the jar
The size grade, if given, tells you how early the fruit was picked; smaller is more labor and more crunch. The origin of the fruit is on the back label, usually in small type. Tarragon and onions in the ingredients mark the French style; dill and sugar mark a German or American one. A cloudy brine or a soft cornichon means the jar is old or was packed with fruit that waited too long. The cornichons on our pickled goods shelf are chosen for snap and sharpness, and they belong beside cured meat, on a cheese board, next to a tin of oily fish and in a chopped spoonful through a potato salad. They are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Every one of them was picked by a person bending to the ground on the right morning.
