The Forgotten Coast & Squash Pickles

Every year the matriarchs of the Gunter family made a pilgrimage to Florida's Forgotten Coast.

Not the Florida of mouse ears, crowded beaches, sunscreen-covered tourists, and long lines. Their Florida. The stretch of coastline many Floridians quietly call Real Florida, where longleaf pines lean into the wind, the water is stained the color of steeped tea, and the pace of life slows to match the tides. It also happened to be the perfect halfway point for the sisters, scattered across the Southeast, to meet for a week with everything they required: nature, quiet beaches, one another...and a cabin with air conditioning.

The drive was part of the ritual.

Most of it wound through forgotten back roads dotted with abandoned country stores and little towns that seemed to exist only because no one had yet decided to erase them. If we timed it right, the roadsides exploded with wildflowers, turning long stretches of highway into ribbons of color. The closer we came to the coast, the more the landscape seemed to exhale. Cypress knees pushed through tea-colored water. Great blue herons stood motionless waiting for breakfast. The road curved alongside Apalachicola Bay, flickering between the shade of towering pines and the relentless Florida sun while stiff palmetto fronds rattled together in the salt breeze.

By the time we crossed into Port St. Joe, it felt like we'd left one world for another.

For fourteen years our destination was T.H. Stone Memorial St. Joseph Peninsula State Park. The cabins sat quietly on the bay side of the peninsula, tucked into a place where Indigenous communities once lived and where shell middens still remind visitors that people have called this coastline home for thousands of years.

Florida has always been a place shaped by water, and nowhere is that more obvious than here. Hurricanes regularly redraw the landscape. Hurricane Michael carved through the dunes, temporarily turning the peninsula into an island and taking the cabins we loved with it. We haven't been back since. Maybe that's why I keep returning to this place in my mind.

Because what made it special was never the cabin.

It was who gathered inside it.

About a week after every trip, the annual competition began. Booking one of those cabins required military-level coordination, four determined sisters, ReserveAmerica, questionable internet connections, and a remarkable amount of random button pushing. Somehow, despite every technological obstacle imaginable, they almost always managed to secure another week together. Every year it felt like a small miracle.

That week belonged to them.

For seven or eight days there were no husbands to feed, no children needing rides, no jobs demanding attention. The conversations wandered the way only sisters' conversations can. Family stories became recipes. Recipes somehow became blood pressure medication. Someone would remember a cousin nobody had thought about in years. Old disagreements softened with time and eventually became punchlines.

Mostly, they rested.

Looking back, I think that's what made those trips so extraordinary. These women had spent most of their lives caring for everyone else. For one week each year, they simply got to be sisters.

Preparation began months before anyone packed a suitcase. Meals were planned in advance because once we arrived, nobody wanted to think about cooking unless they felt like it.

Mama tripled her pimento cheese and cooked extra Florida shrimp to divide among everyone before heading home. Aunt Ginger packed her olive cheese spread. Aunt Lynn brought pecans from her grove, pound cake, and whatever dessert had most recently come out of her kitchen. There were casseroles, chicken pot pie, tomato sauce, beans and sausage, and enough food to comfortably feed a small army.

Then there were the jars.

Corn relish.

Fig preserves.

Pepper jelly.

Pickled vegetables.

Squash pickles.

No Southern table feels complete without something pickled, fermented, or preserved somewhere within reach.

At the time I assumed everyone simply brought what they were known for. Looking back now, I realize they were carrying pieces of home to one another. Every cooler represented an afternoon someone had spent earning their ‘pecan thumb’ shelling pecans, stirring tomato sauce, standing over a table of jars, or making sure there would be enough pimento cheese for everyone to take a little home again.

Food was how they cared for each other.

When I was finally invited to join the matriarchs, I knew it was no small thing. They guarded their peace carefully, and being included felt like stepping into a tradition that had existed long before I arrived. My favorite part wasn't even the beach. It was opening the coolers and knowing I was going to get to take some things home and snack on long after when vacation became just memory. The squash pickles weren’t always on the menu so I would always get a little extra excited when I unpacked them.

We served them with herb-stewed red kidney beans, white rice, and smoked sausage—a meal we'd eat after a day spent reading, swimming, and pretending we had nowhere else to be. One time I attempted to gather wood and get the grill working to cook the sausage but the labor of it just didn’t fit the theme of the trip. More often than not, vacation convinced us that a cast-iron skillet on the stove was perfectly acceptable.

If you've read many of my stories, you've probably noticed my family's obsession with condiments. My mother believes nearly every meal deserves something pickled, fermented, or preserved alongside it. The Gunter sisters feel exactly the same way.

I've spent years collecting recipes from my family, but somewhere along the way I realized the jars were never really the point. The jars simply carried the memories home.

Most evenings ended around the screened porch table as the light softened over the bay. We'd hear little animals rustling beneath the cabin, squirrels racing across the screens, and birds settling into the trees while everyone quietly (or not so quietly) added spoonfuls of this and dollops of that to paper plates balanced on our laps.

Simple food. Extraordinary company. And zero plans. Three daughters and their mother, my GranMonkey, the matriarch of matriarchs. Most mornings I'd wake right after my mother and sit on the porch. Someone would put seed out for the birds (and squirrels) we’d sip coffee, read our books, and watch the sun slowly pull itself over the bay while the rest of the cabin stretched awake. In the earlier years, when everyone was a little more ambitious we would go hike over to the Gulf side of the park through the dunes that the gunter sisters begrudgingly named ‘the dune of tears’. As the years continued the novelty of that wore off. The only requirement that was ever set in stone was by the last day, we had to take GranMonkey over to the Gulf side to ‘put her toes in the sand”. We would bring blankets or chairs, and spend the evening watching the sunset over the water and hoping we'd catch the elusive green flash that sometimes appears just as the sun slips below the horizon.

Those are the moments I carry home now. Not souvenirs. Moments.

Years later, after Hurricane Michael, I found myself texting Aunt Lynn for her squash pickle recipe.

She lives about eight hours north in an 1890s farmhouse surrounded by a hundred-acre pecan grove in rural Alabama. An old dirt road still runs past the house—the original main street before the town slowly shifted elsewhere. The house has survived because generations of people kept tending it. The more I thought about it, the more it reminded me of the recipes inside.

When Aunt Lynn answered my text, she walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down a worn community cookbook. Not a family cookbook. Not a handwritten collection carefully passed from mother to daughter. Just one of those little church and ladies' auxiliary cookbooks found in kitchens all across the South, filled with recipes submitted by women whose names most of us will never know.

The pages were stained. The measurements were sparse. The instructions assumed you already knew the parts that mattered because, at the time, most women did. The invisible instructions weren't forgotten. They had simply never needed to be written down. Then Aunt Lynn laughed. "The recipe I make isn't really either one of these."

Years ago she and her younger sister, Ginger, used to put up bushels of squash together every summer. Somewhere along the way they started combining two nearly identical recipes from the cookbook. One had more onions. The other had mustard seed. Between the two recipes—and between the two sisters—they quietly became one.

I had spent years believing these were a special family recipe. They weren't. They were already an adaptation.

A few weeks later, in my attempt to make my own pickles, I drove out to Fisher Farms to buy some squash. Confidently, I announced that I wanted a whole bushel. Thankfully they only had a half bushel available. About halfway through slicing squash, sterilizing jars, making brine, and wondering why I insist on turning every project into a marathon, I realized a half bushel was more than enough.

I started with Aunt Lynn's recipe. Then I looked back at the two originals. Then I listened to her notes. Then I started making changes of my own. Hot peppers because I love a little heat. Fresh ginger and tumeric from the garden. And I reduced the amount of cloves. By the time the jars cooled on the counter, the recipe had changed once again.

Not dramatically.

Just enough that it had quietly become mine. Somewhere in the middle of making those pickles, I realized I'd misunderstood tradition.

For years I believed preserving tradition meant faithfully recreating exactly what came before. But that's never what these women did. They substituted when the garden or farmstand gave them something different. They borrowed recipes from neighbors. They combined two versions into one. They cooked from memory, adjusted seasonings without measuring, and quietly improved what they inherited.

I don't know who Margaret Hare or Martha Templin were. I don't know if they ever met. I doubt they imagined that decades later two sisters in Alabama would blend their recipes together that they submitted to the cookbook that made its way into my Aunts kitchen, or that years after someone in Florida would continue adapting them while thinking about the women who came before.

Funny how recipes travel farther than the people who write them.

The cookbook was never really the important part. It was simply where the story began. The real knowledge lived in the women—in conversations across kitchen counters, in phone calls asking how much turmeric they actually used, in sisters standing shoulder to shoulder over bushels of squash saying, "Will these squash ever end." That's the part that gets preserved. Not because someone wrote it down. Because someone cared enough to keep making it.

Every time I pull a jar of squash pickles from my pantry shelf, I'm preserving much more than squash. I'm preserving a week on the Forgotten Coast, paper plates on the screened porch, coffee before sunrise, three sisters laughing, and a grandmother determined to put her toes in the Gulf one more time before heading home.

The cabins may someday return. Maybe they won't. Florida has always had a way of reshaping itself. Thankfully, traditions don't live in buildings. They live in the people willing to keep making the pickles.

Aunt Lynn’s Squash Pickles

The version I carry forward, adapted from Aunt Lynn’s recipe.

Yield: about 8-10 pints · Prep: 1 hour · Cook: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

‍1 gallon of thinly sliced yellow squash or zucchini
2 cup white onion, julienne
2 bell pepper, assorted colors, julienne
2 hot peppers, sliced in half
3 1/2 cup white raw sugar
1.5 quart white vinegar
1 tablespoon yellow mustard seed
1 tablespoon celery seed
6 each whole cloves
1.5 teaspoon turmeric
2 tablespoons salt

Method:

‍Slice squash into thin rings into a large bowl. Salt squash and let stand for a minimum of one hour or overnight. Add all the other ingredients into a pot and bring to a boil. Strain squash and add to the pot and cook 3-4 minutes only. Remember there will be carry over cooking and the squash are thinly sliced. Pack in sterile jars leaving a 1/4 inch gap from the top of the jar. Seal jars in boiling water using standard canning procedures.

This story is part of Food as Geography, a Food Stories Project collection exploring the ways food carries place, memory, people, and tradition.