On Friday, Aug. 25, 2000, Doris Rubenstein was in a bit of a pickle.

The Minnesota State Fair had once again rejected her kosher pickles from its Creative Activities competition, she said on that day’s episode of the TPT public affairs show “Almanac.” Judges told her that, because the brine was cloudy, the pickles were spoiled and could cause illness.

No, not dangerous or damaged, she explained — just different.

Whereas many pickles, including ones historically entered into Fair competition, are canned in a vinegar solution that acidifies them, kosher sour pickles are fermented in a saltwater brine. Unlike vinegar pickling, this fermentation process relies on natural bacteria converting sugars in the cucumbers into lactic acid. It’s a living process, and jars of kosher pickles may naturally appear cloudy and slightly bubbly, she said.

Dressed in loud floral print, a Star of David necklace and delightfully massive glasses on “Almanac,” Rubenstein had no idea she’d become something of a Jewish pickle icon — nor that it would be 24 more years before the Fair would finally accept pickles like hers into competition.

This year, for the first time, the State Fair opened a new competitive class dedicated to fermented cucumbers, aka kosher sour pickles. It’s part of the inaugural fermented products division, which also includes new kimchi and scratch-made vinegar classes, plus the preexisting sauerkraut competition.

And one of the judges for the new kosher pickle class? Doris Rubenstein, of course.

“I’m here as myself, but I’m here on behalf of other ethnic groups whose foods are also not represented at the State Fair but are standard parts of Twin Cities and Minnesota food right now,” said Rubenstein, now in her 70s. “(The Fair) admits that they need to be more inclusive of people who are not from Northern Europe and Scandinavia. They’re finally coming around.”

The year of the pickle?

Entrants in the inaugural fermented cucumber and kimchi categories are displayed in the Minnesota State Fair Creative Activities building on Monday, Aug. 26, 2024. Janice Schachtman of Hopkins took home the blue ribbon for her pickles, in the contest judged in part by longtime kosher pickle advocate Doris Rubenstein. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

When Doris Rubenstein’s uncle, the family’s pickle maven, died in the mid-1980s, his pickle recipe went with him.

For years, Rubenstein had been searching for a pickle with the same electrifying zap that his homemade kosher sours had. Finally, at a Passover seder meal in 1999, she found it — the perfect pickle! — courtesy of Aviva Breen, who at the time was the director of the Legislative Commission on the Economic Status of Women in Minnesota.

Breen shared her recipe, and Rubenstein got to work.

A longtime State Fair fan, she entered the pickles in that summer’s competition. Disqualified; no explanation given, she said. She tried again the next summer, at the 2000 Fair, making sure she followed the rules to the letter.

Disqualified again. This time, judges explained that her pickles had clearly gone bad and were unsafe to eat.

“I opened up a jar, picked up a pickle, ate it in front of the judges,” Rubenstein quipped, “and they stood there, waiting for me to die.”

She took the story to the media, including that “Almanac” appearance. In 2017, playwright Deborah Yarchun wrote “A Pickle,” a play based on Rubenstein’s efforts, which premiered at the Minnesota Fringe Festival. The one-woman show has since been staged across North America, including a sold-out and well-received Twin Cities run in 2021.

But Fair competition managers never budged. And after the 2000 attempt, Rubenstein stopped bothering to submit her pickles to the Fair.

So, in the tradition of the Passover meal, we ask: Why is this year different from all other years? Why did it take two and a half decades to get kosher pickles accepted into the State Fair?

“They have a new person in charge of Creative Activities,” Rubenstein said. “Who is open to something new! From somebody whose last name isn’t Johnson or Hanson or Wetherstrom!”

That person is Samantha Gilbertson, who was promoted to competition manager in the State Fair’s Creative Activities department in 2022. While Gilbertson had overseen competitions as a supervisor since the mid-2010s, she said, she was now in a position to take meetings and evaluate proposed new competitive categories.

“It didn’t fit into a box, and I think there was some hesitation going outside the box,” Gilbertson said, of Rubenstein’s pickles. She was not on the State Fair’s staff when Rubenstein submitted her pickles in 2000 and was unaware of the pickle controversy until this summer, she said.

Earlier this year, Rubenstein requested a meeting with Gilbertson and enlisted the help of a fellow pickle-maker, Robin Doroshow, also a lawyer and the executive director of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.

“She has a little of what we would say in Yiddish, ‘yichus,’ social standing,” Rubenstein said.

About 15 years ago, when Doroshow sought to sell her own pickles in co-ops around the Twin Cities, she ran into similar safety objections from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture as Rubenstein had encountered at the Fair. So Doroshow worked with a food scientist to analyze her grandmother’s recipe and tweak it to fit state standards, and sold pickles under the brand TRRRific Products until she was hired to run the historical society in 2016.

At the meeting, Rubenstein and Doroshow both said, they were pleased to find an open-minded advocate in Gilbertson after years of rejection.

“It’s just a move in the right direction, wanting to include more people in Minnesota who couldn’t have entered before,” Gilbertson said. “They weren’t able to enter, but why not? We have somebody that’s wanting to, and clearly they can’t in another class, so we tried to help fill that void.”

More inclusive categories

Doris Rubenstein poses in front of the Fried Pickles booth at the Minnesota State Fair on Aug. 25, 2017. A play, based on Rubenstein’s efforts to submit kosher-style pickles to the Fair’s Creative Activities competition, premiered at that year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival. (Courtesy of Doris Rubenstein)

The rejection of kosher sour pickles was never intentional discrimination or anti-Semitism, Rubenstein said — just ignorance.

“The judges didn’t come from a culture that eats this kind of pickle,” she said. “The people who were judging them didn’t really know what they were looking at.”

That, Rubenstein said, is why she opted to judge this year’s inaugural contest — along with Breen, who gave Rubenstein her recipe back in 1999 — rather than enter it herself. Out of three qualifying entries, Janice Schachtman of Hopkins took home the blue ribbon.

Gillian Schilke was the sole entrant in the new scratch-made vinegar class. The kimchi class included two qualifying entries; Andrea Kristian of St. Louis Park took first and Teresa Craig of Elk River took second.

For a first-year category, this turnout is promising, Gilbertson said. It can take a couple of years to establish new competitive classes, especially because picklers and fermenters might not have extra jars on hand to submit for judging on short notice.

(Save a few jars from this fall’s pickle batch for next year’s Fair, Rubenstein urges!)

Back in 2000, on “Almanac” — at a dizzying camera angle, and over a soft, jazzy trumpet soundtrack — Rubenstein and host J.G. Preston tasted her pickles from a cloudy jar.

“Maybe there should be a separate category for kosher dill pickles,” Preston suggested.

“For brine-cured pickles,” Rubenstein replied. “You said it!”

Related Articles

Review: Jon Pardi brings the party to the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter visits Urban Boatbuilders, a St. Paul nonprofit turning 30

Grandstand review: T-Pain and Ludacris draw huge crowd with fun, nostalgic show

‘This one was crazy’: MN State Fair crews, vendors scramble to reopen after storms

Heat wave saps Minnesota State Fair attendance, with thunderstorms to boot on Monday night