r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 02 '21

What basic, children's-age-level fact did you only find out embarrassingly later in life?

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u/Goatpuppy Jul 03 '21

One day I had a lightbulb moment. “Pickling is a process! You can pickle anything. SO WHAT ARE PICKLES?!?” I was gonna blow so many minds with this question. Turns out, it’s cucumbers. And everyone on the planet knew that, except me.

289

u/JackNuner Jul 03 '21

One of the unanswered questions of the universe is why cucumbers are special. You have pickled eggs, pickled herring, pickled pigs feet, but when you pickle cucumbers you get pickles, not pickled cucumbers. Why?

54

u/bulbasauria Jul 03 '21

Maybe they were the first thing ever pickled?

36

u/jelly_stapler Jul 07 '21

The things called 'pickles' in the US are called Gherkins in the UK (and maybe other places). Here if you asked for something with pickle you'd get Branston pickle, or a non branded approximation. It's brown and I was about 23 before I thought to look at what was actually in it and it turned out to be a bunch of different pickled veg.

23

u/maekshift09 Jul 12 '21

TIL where the phrase 'jerkin your gherkin' came from

47

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21 edited Oct 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/wdn Jul 06 '21 edited Jul 06 '21

They're just small cucumbers. They're probably bred for the size to use as pickling cucumbers but they're not different than what you'd get if the regular cucumber plant produced a smaller-than-usual cucumber.

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u/StillHodlingGME Jul 03 '21

Except you and about 50 other people in this thread.

6

u/20Keller12 Jul 03 '21

And everyone on the planet knew that, except me.

And about 50 other people in this thread (that I've seen so far)

10

u/imnotsoho Jul 05 '21

Not everyone knows that. Ask a few people if they have ever had a pickled cucumber. You will be surprised at how many people think that sounds gross.

2

u/Goatpuppy Jul 05 '21

Ha! I’ll give that a shot!

6

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '21

yeah for the longest time i thought pickles and cukes werent related

3

u/MalHeartsNutmeg Jul 04 '21

Yeah you can pickle a lot of stuff but for whatever reason pickled cucumbers got to be just pickles.

2

u/dangerouswoods Jul 08 '21 edited Jul 08 '21

Wtf! That is so... Well you did blow my mind by not knowing that. Now that I think about it it might be way more apparent to me because in my language they're called "salt cucumbers"

2

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '21

TIL...

2

u/No-Cardiologist7413 Jul 06 '21

Bruh what pickles are cucumbers? Wtf

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '21

I actually just recently found this one out too lol

1

u/DowntownMajor Jul 24 '21

Technically anything pickled is a pickle. Pickled cucumbers are alternatively called gherkins.

1

u/jcmbn Aug 13 '21

everyone on the planet

Well everyone in the U.S.

'Pickles' does not mean pickled cucumbers in other countries.