A Sweet-and-Sour Passion
A Sweet-and-Sour Passion
“We had to take over the whole house just to keep up with the orders,” says Stanchfield, who last year put up more than 15,000 pints of pickles by hand, a number she expects to increase—in part because consumers are looking for fresh natural products without a processed taste or look.
“People like the old-fashioned jars,” Stanchfield says of her glass jars with the traditional brass-colored ring and pop-top sealer. “I think it’s nostalgia, something they remember from their childhood. But they’re very successful.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. In the early 1990s, Stanchfield started out by putting a few jams, jellies, and pickles at a serve-yourself farm stand in front of Stanchfield Farms, a few miles away from her pickling house on the Medford Road.
Her pickles in particular, she noted, disappeared with amazing rapidity—a surprise, considering that Milo (pop. 2,383) is at the southern edge of Maine’s vast forested and unpopulated wilderness, some 40 miles northwest of Bangor. Over time, the more pickles and relishes she put out in the farm stand, the more they disappeared. By 1995, she was in the pickle business. She is one of few in Maine who both grows and personally processes what she sells.
Today, with the help of her 28-year-old daughter, Sonya, and husband Willie, she still grows “about 80 percent” of the vegetables and spices that go into her various pickle recipes. It would be 100 percent, she says, if the business’ growth would slow down a bit. “But at the rate we’re going now,” she says, “we may even double that” record of 15,000 pints.
From all over the country, pickle lovers are mailing in advance orders for some dilly beans here, fiddlehead Orientals there, garlic dills by the score, or cases of just plain old bread-and-butters. With prices ranging from $2 to $4 a jar (and cheaper by the case), the Stanchfields have a thriving business and a faithful following.
Still, at 56, Stanchfield hadn’t planned on pickle mania for her later years. Working full time as staff sergeant at the local Augusta Armory, she first meant only to augment the modest income she and Willie made from truck farming. In fact, the pickling house was going to be their retirement house after farming became too difficult, but the pickling just proliferated beyond all expectation.
On a typical day at the Stanchfield pickling house, Sonya and two other women cut and prepare beans and cucumbers with machine-like speed and precision in the kitchen area of the single-level, ranch-style pickling house. Empty cartons are piled high in the living room and a bedroom. Filled cartons spill out into a hallway leading to a garage, which is also filled with pickle cartons ready for shipment. In pickling season, Stanchfield joins the show as early as sunrise and usually stays at it until well into the night. “You have to pack them when they’re ready,” she says.
Exactly how far the public’s appetite will carry Maine’s unofficial Pickle Queen and her sweet-and-sour passion is anyone’s guess. “In the beginning, all I wanted to do is make some pickles to sell at the roadside stand,” she says as she begins packing another carton. “But now I have all this,” she adds, sweeping her hand at the stacks of cartons in her pickling house.
“I guess I never really did intend to retire. What would I do? Bake cookies?”
Upload Your Own Stories, Photos and Videos
Related Stories
If you enjoyed reading this story, A Sweet-and-Sour Passion, then you might enjoy these other stories.Discuss this Article
