The Pickled Onion Cure

There is a great book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith; it is about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn before the First World War. It has very evocative descriptions of their daily life and the various food shops they used; the Chinese tea vendor who weighed the tea out on a large balance scale and worked out the change on an abacus. She talked about the moment of perfect balance when the last tea leaves went into the scale when the world seemed to stand still.
She also talked about the pickled onion man; he was a very old Jewish man who sat beside a large vat of pickles. Mostly he’d sit and doze dreaming of the old country and then get into a passion and curse you in Yiddish when you asked for a pickle out of the bottom of the vat; she described how his hands were stained with pickle juice and the pickles were greenish and fat. He wrap the pickle in a scrap of paper and go back to his dozing.

Why would a young girl need a pickle?

She described how suddenly nothing was right anymore, food didn’t taste good, nothing appealed. Life went a bit flat and into black and white. What she needed was the astringency of the pickle; she didn’t exactly eat it. She sort of had it, smelled it and nibbled it for a day and after that everything tasted and felt better again. She almost looked forward to the feeling  when a pickle was the answer.

So what would be your pickled onion? 

I am sure you have experienced those days when nothing will do, you don’t know what to eat, you are bored with everything. You may have a million things you ‘should or could’ do but you just don’t want to.
Comfort food doesn’t work it just weighs you down more, ditto sitting somewhere cozy, having a lie in. They sort of encase you more into the state, you need shocking out of it.
A cold shower or swim might work or if it is the winter going out for a walk in the freezing air. 
When I feel like this I tend to think it will pass, because it always does, some small event, a passing comment even, can just flip the feeling, I feel happier and the energy starts to flow again.

But next time I may find myself a nice fat pickled onion