getting better with age

while i was up at the mountains, wenty and i watched food dvds after everyone had retired for the evening, and one of them was about preserved lemons and cumquats. the lemons and cumquats were salted like how we are told to do in those middle eastern recipes, but the person was saying that you keep them as long as you can (like decades) and they will darken and become very mellow. to illustrate her case in point, she had jars of cumquats of different ages - 1 year, 2 years, 10 years and 50 years (her grandmother pickled that one). she illustrated by taking one cumquat out of each jar, except the 50 year old one, and showed how each one was different and how much nicer the 10 year old one was compared to the 1 year old one.....so (have i lost you yet?)...i've started pickling my cumquats. i want to do the lemons too, but have to wait until i can get some home grown ones.
the 50 year old pickled cumquat, she says is so mellow and mature that not only the flesh melts, the seeds become indistinct, too....my cumquat pickle is less than a day old.....
what was funny about all of this was what wenty told me. after his grandmother died, he had to clean her apartment and her fridge.....there was a jar of something dark which looked like it was lemon slices in a past life. he threw it in the bin, naturally, as one does, but little did he know he was throwing away what could well have been part of his inheritance.