I've been reading Mark Kurlansky's book, The Food of a Younger Land. As a part of the New Deal during the Great Depression in America, work was created for writers under the Federal Writers Project. Its first project, a series of guidebooks on American states was a success; the second, a series on regional food in America titled "America Eats", was shelved due to the outbreak of World War Two. Kurlansky dusts off the original manuscripts for America Eats and presents an American food culture, which for the most part, is long dead.

While recipes and foods still exist, the practices around them have declined: Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, possum-eating parties in the Deep South , rivalries based solely around bivalves and their correct serving in Rhode Island or Manhattan chowders.

In some respects, the book is a raison d'etre for food bloggers. Simple documentation of today's daily food habits form an informal and often overlooked part of culture that is transient. Each article reflects the biases and prejudices of the authors; some are rants, others record food in verse; but pieced together they form the incomplete but nonetheless superlative patchwork that was modern eating.

I'm always on the lookout for unusual flavour combinations. A chapter on maple syrup-makers in Vermont documents "sugaring-off" parties, a day in the maple syrup season in rural Vermont when sugar-makers invite all comers to their "sugarhouse" to the taste the freshly-boiled maple syrup/sugar, turned into candy in the snow. Essential to this Vermont experience were fresh brown doughnuts and sour dill pickles. Roaldus Richmond, the author of this chapter writes:

The hot sugar is ladled onto the snow in fantastic patterns, quickly hardening into brittle amber pools against the white. The sugar is taken up with forks, wound around the tines, and lifted to the mouth. The taste is  indescribable. It is rich and smooth and pleasing, delicate and pure. It is not sickish-sweet, yet sweet enough to require the sour bitterness of pickles to re-sharpen the appetite from time to time...Crisp plain doughnuts help temper the sweetness and strong hot coffee tops off the feast.

Maple syrup, doughnuts and coffee sound explicable and obvious; pickles and maple syrup is a historical flavour combination that I'd never considered. So I got out a dill pickle and dipped it in maple syrup (pictured above). They’re the only two American foods in my pantry, so I should have known that they could work together.

There are no two flavours that do a better job of cancelling each other out. With a little experimentation into the correct concentration of pickle to syrup, you could construct a pickle dish that tastes like nothing at all but full of good pickle texture; a textural amalgam of yielding and crunchiness. You wouldn't achieve much at all from this. While palate-cleansing is a worthy pursuit, there is no glory in tasteless food.

Maple syrup production in Vermont is in decline. Winters are getting warmer and so maple syrup production is creeping north into Canada. Kurlansky writes that where "in the first half of the twentieth century 80 percent of maple syrup production was from the United States, today 75 percent is Canadian". As it slips north, maybe pickles and syrup will no longer exist together.

How many other flavour combinations have been consigned to history?