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1 " Following her instructions, I joined her in the chopping and mixing. The magical smell of pickling spices wound around us and it wasn't long before we were in another world. I was suddenly immersed in the hand-written recipes Mother resurrected from the back of the Hoosier cabinet--in the cheesecloth filled with mustard seed and pungent dill. As we followed the recipes her mother had followed and her mother before that, we talked--as the afternoon wore on I was listening to preserve the stories in my mind. 'I can remember watching my grandmother and mother rushing around this same old kitchen, putting up all kinds of vegetables--their own hand-sown, hand-picked crops--for the winter. My grandmother would tell her stories about growing up right here, on this piece of land--some were hilarious and some were tragic.' Pots still steamed on the stove, but Mother's attention seemed directed backwards as she began to speak about the past. She spoke with a slow cadence, a rhythm punctuated (or maybe inspired) by the natural symphony around us. "
2 " It is a formidable list of jobs: the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry. The whole catering industry and—which would not please Lady Astor, perhaps—the whole of the nation’s brewing and distilling. All the preserving, pickling and bottling industry, all the bacon-curing. And (since in those days a man was often absent from home for months together on war or business) a very large share in the management of landed estates. Here are the women’s jobs—and what has become of them? They are all being handled by men. It is all very well to say that woman’s place is the home—but modern civilisation has taken all these pleasant and profitable activities out of the home, where the women looked after them, and handed them over to big industry, to be directed and organised by men at the head of large factories. Even the dairy-maid in her simple bonnet has gone, to be replaced by a male mechanic in charge of a mechanical milking plant. "
― Dorothy L. Sayers , Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
3 " Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! "
― Salman Rushdie , Midnight's Children
