Crunch time for bamboo pickles

It wasn't unusual for Carla Faw Squires or her friends to eat bamboo pickles during their childhoods in Wilkes County.

The tangy and crunchy bamboo pickles people pickled here have been part of the local fare for decades, but Squires is spreading the taste beyond Wilkes and taking it commercial.

A jar of her Bamboo Ladies Bamboo Pickles was part of the holiday gift basket offered through Asheville's Blue Ridge Food Ventures, a food business incubator. Last October, the bamboo pickles won a national taste test award from Cooking Light magazine.

"If you often find Southern pickles overly sweet, you'll be blown away by a tart vinegar balance and a texture that's crisp and yielding…" wrote 2010 Taste Test awards editor Cindy Hatcher. "Charming, odd and delicious, they're a perfect gift for the adventurous foodie."

The bamboo pickles are sold as a gourmet delicacy at $8 for a 9-ounce jar in stores in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Asheville, Winston-Salem and other places. They've been available at the Wilkes Heritage Museum (they're sold out right now), but Squires doesn't stock them in any Wilkes County stores, thinking that people here wouldn't pay for something neighbors give away.

"We grew up on the pickles," she said. "Everybody made them. It wasn't an unusual thing for us."

The history of Wilkes County bamboo pickles started through another Ferguson area family, according to Edith Ferguson Carter, who owns and operates Whippoorwill Academy and Village, a collection of log buildings, church and cabins on her family farm in Ferguson. Carter is a rural historian of the area that's linked to Tom Dooley and Daniel Boone.

Carter said her aunt, Blanche Ferguson, was a government nurse who worked in a hospital during construction of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century and brought back a plant or two of bamboo to see if it would grow in North Carolina.

They found it grew like kudzu. People hacked it away from places it wasn't wanted.

Carter's brother-in-law, Bill Underwood, a Marine in the Pacific theater during World War II, saw how people there did a lot of cooking with bamboo shoots. Although people in modern-day U.S. culture may know bamboo for its use in flooring or furniture, in Asia, the delicate new shoots have long been boiled or cooked for food. In Japan, people may eat the crunchy bamboo shoots with rice or as part of a stir-fry dish.

So when Underwood came home from the war, he posed a question to his new mother-in-law, who had a reputation as a wonderful cook and pickler of cucumbers.

"I wonder if we could pickle these bamboo?" Underwood asked Edith Ferguson, the mother of Edith Ferguson Carter.

Edith Ferguson tried it.

"She was such a generous person, she gave the recipe out to all the neighbors so all the neighbors were making bamboo pickles," Carter said.

Meanwhile, Squires' grandmother, the late Johnsie Walsh, planted seven sprigs of bamboo behind her home in 1970. There's 3 acres of bamboo there now.

So people such as the Fergusons, Underwoods and Walshes would expermiment with their own pickle recipes. They cut rings of bamboo, and packed jars with seasonings and spices, and processed them in a water bath.

Squires is her family's third generation bamboo pickler, joining her grandmother and mother, Iva "Babe" Walsh Faw, in making bamboo pickles for friends and family.

Squires, who'd moved to Raleigh, had a corporate career of more than 20 years arranging financing for technology needs. But when her job cooled along with the economy in 2006, she turned back to a family tradition – pickling.

She went to pickle school at North Carolina State University and other places, studying chemistry and microbiology, learning how to test for pH levels along with big-time picklers such as people from Kraft Foods.

The Bamboo Ladies Bamboo Pickles company she formed is based in Raleigh, but she drives each May to that 3-acre bamboo grove in Ferguson. Friends and family use machetes to cut bamboo shoots, which grow 4 to 12 feet tall.

They shuck the silks, then slice the bamboo across like a banana, ending up with rings of bamboo. Squires drives the bamboo rings to Blue Ridge Food Ventures, where she processes some 1,500 to 2,500 jars of bamboo pickles in a season that lasts three to six weeks. She sold her first jars in 2007, and typically sells out each year.

It's a new business and career, but also a continuation of family heritage. Her grandmother died in 2003, and Squires was the only one of more than a dozen grandchildren who regularly helped make bamboo pickles.

"If anyone is going to continue, it's going to be me," Squires said. "I thought, 'If I'm going to do it, I'm not going to make a few.'"

As she went to pickle school and people would occasionally ask if she was the "bamboo lady," she got the idea to name the company in tribute to her mother and grandmother.

mmitchell@wsjournal.com

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