Relish Jars By Donovan's Cellar Specialty Foods

Whether you consider it savvy marketing or delicious coincidence, the pickles from freshly launched D's Specialty Foods are the result of happy timing.

Originally, Donovan's Cellar Specialty Foods was an incubator project for its founders, Brendan Donovan and Francis Derby, who jarred the line's pickles and relish while waiting to open a restaurant in New York.

But what started as a side project has taken the spotlight: These jars of preserves are lodestars in a pickle-thick world.

Ideal for salads, the ginger-spiced beets ($10) avoid the root vegetable's oft-encountered fate of textural oblivion; instead, each beet piece offers a satisfying snap,. For the maple-chile relish ($10), cucumbers are treated with deference and pickled using the sous-vide technique. The slow-and-low heat turns these workhorses of the vegetable patch, flavored with maple syrup and the gentle heat of pink peppercorns, into royalty.

Here's to the details.