It was long thought that the very tiny German pixie men were
nothing more than a novelty dreamed up to delight tourists and fashion cuckoo
clock springs, and that once the penchant of northern Europeans for digital
timepieces overcame their sentimental adoration of wooden ones, the miniature
fellows would find themselves out of work.
Fearing what might happen should a hoard of starving,
underemployed wee Germans take to the streets, the beneficent owners of a local
sauerkraut factory devised a solution: he put them to work in the pickle vats,
where they stood, in doll-sized wellington boots upon the raw cabbage, raking
it over and throwing tiny armfuls of salt upon each layer. A good pair could
thus be occupied in a sauerkraut barrel for an entire day.
If, however, one or both succumbed to fatigue and did not
meet their quota quickly enough, the ladder providing their only means of exit
would be lifted away from the barrel’s edge until productivity increased.
After a particularly unfortunate incident which resulted in
the suffocation of a miniscule sauerkraut worker who slipped and was quickly
inundated with a fresh load of shaved cabbage from the chute above, the little
people called a strike in order to win better working conditions.
Sadly, the strike resulted in halting the supply of sauerkraut
to the stores, whereupon German housefraus abandoned cabbage as a staple and
switched instead to a diet consisting entirely of sausage. Millions died as a
result of clogged arteries.
Today, these events are memorialized in the extremely small
and hard to see plastic figurine which can be found buried in every jar of sauerkraut.
Luckily, the label warns against swallowing said figure, and offers up a year’s
supply of kraut to anyone finding a special sauerkraut turning pitchfork
instead.
The Cooking of Germany, Time-Life
Books, 1968
Also from this book: Potato Pancakes, Sauerkraut Stuffed Pineapple, Ludwig Boltzmann's Steak Tartar, When The Wheels Fall Off
