The pickle queen of Portland, OR: Mrs. Neusihin’s story

Although Cornelius has had pickle, vinegar and cider plants in it’s history, this pickle story is not a Cornelius story. It is however an Oregon story and one that interested me because I used to love this brand of pickles growing up. Perhaps you too will find the story interesting.

The Pickle Queen of Portland: Remembering Mrs. Neusihin

If you grew up in Portland before 1983, you might remember a pickle like no other. Not the bright green, vinegar-sharp spears from the supermarket, but something deeper, more complex: a cloudy-brined, naturally fermented kosher dill that people swear was the best pickle ever made.

That pickle came from a tiny woman, described by a writer as “no bigger than a gherkin,” all of five feet tall on her tippy-toes and maybe a hundred pounds, working in a basement at 420 SW College Street in historic South Portland. The neighborhood was the center of Portland’s Jewish immigrant community from the early 20th century until the 1960s. Settled primarily by Eastern European and Sephardic Jews, the neighborhood was a self-contained cultural hub featuring synagogues, kosher shops, and communal institutions. Most of this historic district was demolished during the South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project in the late 1950s and early 1960s, leading the community to migrate west toward Hillsdale and Southwest Portland. Sarah’s house at 420 SW College Street is one of the few buildings from that era that survived the demolition, likely because it was an active commercial operation. What this pickle maker lacked in size, she made up for in determination and an absolutely unshakeable confidence in her pickles.

Her name was Sarah Neusihin, and she built a Portland food legend one barrel at a time. An Oregon Journal newspaper reporter visited once for a story. He said the Neusihin pickle house was easy to find: the crisp smell of garlic and spices and dill came out into the street, and there were pickle barrels by the curb and Mrs. Neusihin herself shaking a mop on the back porch when he arrived. “Why don’t you go downstairs to the pickle business,” she hollered and disappeared behind the kitchen door. “Downstairs” was the basement where the pickle magic happened and would for the next 35 years!

The fragrance as you drove by the house was known to make grown men swoon. Firemen at the station across the street tried to curb their casual visits to their neighbor. But it was hard; the pickles drew them in. They took special care of Mrs. Neusihin once she became a widow and checked on her each night as she turned off the downstairs lights, usually near midnight, and turned on those in her living quarters above. “They’re my boys, let me tell you,” she said. How many hours a day does she work? “Don’t ask,” she said. “When I’m through downstairs, there’s the house above. And I read. I like to take an interest.”

A Russian Immigrant’s American Dream

Sarah was born in 1895 in Slutzk, Russia. In 1923, at age 27, she immigrated to the United States with her mother and twin sister, joining her brother Rabbi Joseph Fain, who served Portland’s Kesser Israel, Linath Hazedek, and Shaarie Torah synagogues simultaneously. Life wasn’t easy. She married Solomon Neusihin, a peddler of second-hand furniture. Together they had three children: Irving, Rose, and Sherma.

By the early 1930s, with the Depression crushing American families, Sarah had worked since she was 12, and she looked for ways to help the family make ends meet. She knew how to make pickles. Not the quick-brined, vinegar-packed pickles that were becoming standard in American stores, but the traditional Eastern European way: the method passed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother before that. Wild lacto-fermentation in wooden barrels. No vinegar. No preservatives. Just cucumbers, salt, water, garlic, dill, time, and of course love.

She originally made one barrel of kosher dill pickles and then peddled them door to door in the neighborhood. It was the late Dr. James Rosenfeld who really set her off in the pickle business. He was her doctor, and she took a batch of her dill pickles to his nurse as a gift on a visit. She raved about them, Dr. Rosenfeld tried them and loved them and insisted that dill pickles like that should be made available to others. He suggested that she see certain merchants. She was encouraged by Basket Grocery. In 1933, she packed a few dozen jars and walked into the Sealy-Dresser fancy grocery store in downtown Portland. “I took some to the fancy grocery store and said they should taste. They took all I had, showed me how to do billing, and I’m making pickles from that day.” That was the beginning.

The Secret Was in the Process

What made Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles different wasn’t just the recipe; it was the method, and the method couldn’t be rushed. She used massive wooden barrels: 50-gallon, 400-pound monsters that sat in her basement. The cucumbers went in whole (with the blossom end carefully removed to prevent mushiness), covered with a salt brine of exactly the right concentration (3-5% salt to water). Garlic, dill, spices, and grape leaves for tannin and crunch. Then came the crucial step: the barrels were rolled. Local legend says Sarah had workers roll the barrels up and down the sidewalk daily on SW College Street to agitate the brine and ensure even fermentation.

The pickles sat for 4-6 weeks in those barrels, never heated, never pressure-cooked, never touched by vinegar. Wild Lactobacillus bacteria on the cucumber skins did all the work, converting sugars to lactic acid and creating that distinctive cloudy brine that meant you were getting live, probiotic pickles. The result? A pickle with a soft but firm texture, a deep tangy flavor, and a complexity that industrial pickles could never match.

By the 1960s, Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles were famous. Meier & Frank sold them. Lipman’s sold them, and about every other you-name-it grocer in Portland stocked them. Everyone’s favorite restaurants served them: Rose’s, Farrell’s, and Yaw’s served them for over 30 years. Orders came from Park Avenue in New York, from Anchorage, Alaska, from Hawaii and all points in between. As demand grew, even the big stores were held to an allotment.

“Anybody tastes them, they are coming again,” Sarah told a reporter in 1967. “I’ll tell you something else. I never spent one nickel in advertising is the whole truth. Every year we have to put up more, and every year we are running short. Have to look for customers? We never have.” When asked how many she made, she replied, “Not enough. We make all we can and we’re always short. Last year, maybe 150 tons. But what can you do? People are crazy for the pickles.”

The pickles were so beloved that in July 1966, two “beatnik type people” tried to steal a 400-pound barrel right off the sidewalk. Nine hours later, police found the barrel abandoned in a narrow alley where the thieves had tried to roll it. Sarah, 70 years old, was asleep upstairs in her residence at the time. Even pickle thieves couldn’t handle those barrels.

When asked if she’d do anything differently if she started over: “No, it gives me satisfaction. People like it and praise me. It is the same now.” She said, not without some pride, “I have never lost a customer.” Reporters who came to interview her would find her down in the basement, up to her elbows in pickle brine, working alongside her husband Solomon and later her son Irving. But she’d always take time for family. “If a grandson should drop by, he should sit down, have a piece of schnecken and a button sewed on, maybe. In that order.” Her children and grandchildren were her pride: Irving, who became a mechanical engineer; Rose (Mrs. Max Cooper), who went to Reed College and Berkeley; Sherma (Mrs. Robert Shelley), who finished at University of Washington. All college graduates. Professionals. Naturally, she was proud of the pickles, but she would rather talk about her family. When an interviewer tried to steer the conversation back to pickles, she said with a twinkle in her eyes, “Very well, but you aren’t getting the formula.”

When asked about the secret to her success, she got philosophical and explained her focus was absolute: “I don’t know cards, or golf or luncheons. But pickles? Pickles I know.” When asked about the economy in difficult times: “Why should I worry about the economy? I have plenty to eat. Can I change it?” This was Sarah Neusihin: practical, hardworking, fiercely independent, with no patience for nonsense but infinite patience for pickles.

She worked alongside Solomon until his death in 1958. Their son Irving, who’d trained as an engineer and worked for the federal government, joined the business in 1960 to help his aging mother. The business stayed in that basement on SW College Street for three decades: wooden barrels, hand-packing, the old ways. As the neighborhood around them was demolished and rebuilt, the pickle operation continued.

The End of an Era

On April 21, 1970, Sarah Neusihin died at Holladay Park Hospital. She was 74 years old. Her obituary noted that “generations of Portlanders” had enjoyed her pickles, and that the family would continue the business using her formulas. They tried. Irving ran the company for four years, but his health was failing (diabetes that would eventually take his sight).

In 1974, he sold to two young Portland entrepreneurs, Wayne Blum and Brian Katz (both in their early 20s, English majors!) for a six-figure sum. The business was grossing $250,000 a year and employed 13 people. Blum and Katz meant well. They wanted to preserve the tradition. But around 1980, they sold to Howard Lofland, who tried to compete with industrial pickle makers on price. It didn’t work. The overhead was too high. You can’t mass-produce barrel-fermented pickles and compete with Vlasic. In September 1983, Lofland liquidated the business.”It wasn’t like anything that big pickle makers Nalley’s or Steinfeld’s put out,” Lofland said at the end. “In the final analysis, I should have repositioned it as a gourmet item.” He was right. But by then, it was too late.

What Was Lost

Somewhere in those ownership changes, the knowledge was lost. Not just the recipe (anyone can write down ingredients). But the knowing. How to judge when the fermentation was right. Which cucumbers to use and when. How much to roll the barrels and for how long. The bacterial cultures that lived in those specific wooden barrels, built up over decades. The temperature and humidity of that particular basement. The muscle memory of 40 years of pickle-making. Sarah had said it herself: “Experience is the best teacher. And if you use your head, not just your hands, if you work and are interested in the work you are doing, you can do this.” But you needed to be interested in the work. You needed to use your head. You needed the experience. And all of that walked out the door when Irving sold in 1974, struggling with failing health and unable to pass on what his mother had spent 40 years learning.

The brand was passed around by different companies for a number of years in an attempt to revive Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles. They used the name, but they used pressure-cooking and modern methods. People who remembered the original pickles said it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t even close!

The last jars labeled “Mrs. Neusihin’s” were distributed by Bay Valley Foods of Illinois in 2014. But if you looked at the ingredients, you’d see vinegar listed. The old labels proudly declared “CONTAINS NO VINEGAR”; that was the whole point. These new pickles also contained “lactic acid” (added chemically to fake the fermented taste) and calcium chloride (a firming agent, because they’re not using grape leaves). The label still claimed “Cloudy Brine Means Perfect Pickles,” but it’s not the cloudiness of live bacterial fermentation. It’s just marketing. The real Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles died in 1983, thirteen years after Sarah herself.

In 1976, six years after Sarah died, The Oregonian wrote a tribute piece called “Women to Remember: Three Flavors of Portland.” Sarah was one of those three flavors along with Rose Naftalin (Rose’s Delicatessen) and Rose Merlo Biggi (Beaver Brand Horseradish). The article ended with this line: “A shrine should be built in that original basement pickle factory on SW College Street.”

No shrine was ever built. The building at 420 SW College Street still stands in what’s now Portland State University’s neighborhood, one of the few survivors of the urban renewal that erased historic South Portland.

But Sarah’s basement pickle operation is long gone. What remains is memory. And for those of us who never tasted Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles, that’s all we have: the stories of people who remember when Portland had something truly special. When a tiny Russian immigrant woman, no bigger than a gherkin, built a business one barrel at a time and refused to compromise on quality for 40 years.

Sarah Neusihin never spent one nickel on advertising. She let the pickles speak for themselves. And people listened, from Portland to Park Avenue, from Anchorage to Hawaii. People who tasted her pickles came back for more. “Anybody tastes them, they are coming again.” They came back until there were no more pickles to buy. And then they remembered.

If You Remember

Did you ever taste Mrs. Neusihin’s pickles? Do you have memories of that cloudy brine, that distinctive flavor? Did you know Sarah or her family? Do you have photos, stories, or memories to share?

Sarah Neusihin
Born: August 23, 1895, Slutzk, Russia
Died: April 21, 1970, Portland, Oregon
Buried: Kesser Israel Cemetery
Her pickles: 1933-1983
Her voice: “But pickles? Pickles I know.”

Research sources: Oregon Historical Society archives, Oregonian and Oregon Journal archives 1963-1987, Portland city directories, naturalization records, death certificates, marriage records, product labels and photographs courtesy of Irving Neusihin and family archives. Story by: J. LeRiche