I know where Peter Piper’s pickled peppers are! They are in my kitchen. At least, about a third of them are.

I had some peppers in my refrigerator that were not going to be used up before they shrivelled up, so I decided to pickle them. I had pickled some peppers a couple of months previously and was quite pleased with the result, so I decided to use the same recipe again.

I used to do quite a lot of canning when my children were still children, and I have kept the canning bath, the jar grabber, and some jars and lids. So, I was ready!

After the process was complete and the hot jars were cooling on my kitchen counter, I was reminded of the old tongue-twister about Peter Piper that was first published in John Harris’s Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation in 1813:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

So, that got me wondering, how much is a peck?

When I Googled it, I was told that a peck is 9.3 quarts, which is equivalent to 8801 millilitres. I had five 500-millilitre jars for a total of 2500 millilitres. That, I decided, was near-as-dammit a third of a peck.

So, there you have it. About a third of Peter Piper’s pickled peppers are on my kitchen counter. They are accompanied by some pickled carrots because I had excess brine.

Now to find out why putting things in jars is called canning.