So I sat down and was looking at the menu in this place, which was an outlet of the Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant chain.   There was an item listed that read in part:

Classic Cheese Minis Combo: USDA Choice minis with cheese and signature sauce. Served with fries. 

Read it quickly and then answer this question: what’s a classic cheese mini?  Reading it slowly just now I see that there was code in there that any American who was used to reading menus in the U.S. over the last 10 years would probably have understood. I.e., I’m guessing that “USDA Choice” is short-hand for beef. So, someone other than me might have guessed that a Classic Cheese Mini was a mini cheeseburger.  It was a surprise to me, however, when the plate arrived with two little cheese burgers on the plate.

But I hadn’t really thought about what the Classic Cheese Mini was at all before I ordered. You see, my attention was drawn to that item on the menu when I read the complete description:

Classic Cheese Minis Combo: USDA Choice minis with cheese and signature sauce. Served with fries and a fried pickle.

Fried pickle?! Fried Pickle?! What the heck was the deal with a fried pickle? I’d never heard of that, even though I went to plenty of burger places in North Carolina while I was in graduate school in Chapel Hill. Clearly it was my Food on Fridays duty to try a fried pickle.

There was a small glitch, though, when my plate of mini-cheese burgers and fries arrived at the table, it was lacking the  fried pickle!  I asked for the missing item, of course, and the waiter delivered a whole bowl of them to make up for the initial oversight:

Fried Green Pickle, Ruby Tuesdays restaurant, North Carolina

Fried Green Pickle (closeup), Ruby Tuesdays restaurant, North Carolina

It turned out that a fried pickle is a pickle that is sliced, battered-dipped and deep-fried, served hot. Crunchy and warm, it tasted like … a pickle. Not bad, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to try it again.

Of course, the best one is supposed to be in Arkansas, where it was first offered in 1963 by the Fatman:

Fried dill pickles were popularized by Bernell “Fatman” Austin in 1963 at the Duchess Drive In located in Atkins, Arkansas.^[1][2] The Fatman’s Recipe is only known to his family and used once each year at the annual Picklefest in Atkins, held each May.^[3] The recipe for Fried pickle at Wikibooks is a general one. — from the Fried Pickle Wikipedia entry

A. There is a Picklefest. B.  Somebody named the Fatman invented the Fried Pickle. B. The Fatman’s recipe is top-secret. C. You can only get the Fatman family’s one true fried pickle in Arkansas once a year.

I love it!

But while you might not easily be able to sample the Fatman’s dish, you can get a reasonable facsimile at Ruby Tuesday’s all year round. Well, you at least you can at one of their branches in North Carolina. I looked up their menu online to get the exact wording of that dish and  saw to my surprise that while their general menu lists the Classic Cheese Mini Combo, there’s no mention of the fried pickle. Hmm. When a Food on Friday almost qualifies as a Monday Mystery, I guess.