Meals Moods Moments Memories

I am in a contemplative mood as I sit here and write, looking around me with some fondness and slight regret that I will soon pack up this lovely lounge where I have had, in this past year, many cosy evenings by the fireplace. There’s been so many changes in my life:  I started this blog and at last in a small way started giving voice to my inner writer, got engaged to a man whom I want to spend the rest of my life with, turned 50, buried my father, and am ending this year with an offer on a house accepted… a house with at last, a beautiful kitchen at the heart of it.

The biggest constant though has been and continues to be that there are always meals to be cooked, tables to linger around at, people to feed wonderfully prepared  food to: at the heart of me there’s that. I am in good company: not only with all the foodies and food bloggers, but also with a certain Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown, who views cooking as one of the most spiritual things one can do: at how it connects us with the earth, ourselves and others. I have to admit, not every meal that I cook is as conscious and as deeply meaningful and meditative as it could be: but on balance I understand and subscribe to the truth in that. I love cooking. When I cook I feel alive..

Something though that I don’t do a lot of, is baking. But then yesterday, standing in my fiancee’s kitchen, cutting a little lid off a ripe grenadilla and sucking the tart juice out of it as I did when I were a child, he said: “I love grenadilla icing on cakes” and in two seconds I had decided that I needed to bake him a cake. In another half an hour we had found a recipe for a basic sponge cake, done a recce of his cupboards for the staple ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder: all of which he had. We had to go to a supermarket to get the rest: springform cake tins, icing sugar, cream cheese(for the frosting as the americans call it), fresh eggs, and in the next hour and a half we collectively separated eggs, creamed the sugar and egg yolks, sifted flour and eventually, triumphantly slid two tins with pale, almost bubbly with air, cake batter into the preheated oven. I was astounded at how it all came back to me: in moments I seemed to have access to all which my grandmother and mother taught me about baking: I demonstrated to my lover the technique of “folding in” the egg whites beaten to “soft peak” stage; I sternly warned about not opening the oven door to check the progress until at least 30 minutes at the low heat of 180, just like my grandmother used to. I almost could hear her voice.

She taught me how to bake. My sister and I used to go and stay with our maternal grandparents for maybe a weekend sometimes, and since my gran always baked at least bread and at the most a couple of cakes for the local church bazaar, we were automatically included in the proceedings. She would start after breakfast, assembling the ingredients on her formica kitchen table: flour, Royal baking powder in that familiar red tin: “Tried and Trusted” still printed on the front as it was over 40 years ago; butter, eggs, mixing bowls, the hand held egg beater soon whirring away in her deft hands. At first we were given little tasks like holding the sieve, or stirring the mixture, then as we got older, she taught us how to separate eggs, using the half shell to carefully scoop up the yolk again and again while the white falls gloopily into a bowl underneath. I remember when I first saw Nigella just break the egg into her hand and let the albumen run through her fingers, I thought: now why did my gran never do that? Yesterday I did it the way my gran taught me: a homage in a way(which also meant that I got some egg yolk in the bowl of egg white!) Not critical since I was not making meringue, but I still got exasperated with my clumsiness, as I did when I was ten years old!

And soon there would be fragrant hot heat, giving up a vanilla scent, in her kitchen, as there soon was yesterday in the apartment of my fiancee. I could smell when the cakes were ready almost before the timer went off.  They came out of the oven perfectly evenly cooked, just beginning to brown. We Skyped his mom in Toronto and I had to show her the cakes, still warm, and not iced yet. That came later. And at 11 last night we had cake and tea, the texture perfect, the sweet icing melding with the distinctive astringent grenadilla juice, the black pips crunching under our teeth, and me smiling a promise to bake another cake, soon. Maybe even bread. In a new kitchen. In a New Year.

Kitchen!  My husband to be has put in a offer to buy a house which has a kitchen which I fell completely in love with even just looking at the  photographs on the estate agent’s website. These photographs can be so deceptive: wide angle shots, strategic angles. We viewed the house a week  ago, and I found myself looking at all the other rooms first, resisting the temptation to walk straight though to what promised to be the perfect kitchen.. The lounge was beautiful, with pressed ceilings, the spacious dining room open to the lounge, with a wood burning fireplace with a Victorian surround, as in the photographs. The bathrooms were perfect. So were the bedrooms.  The main bedroom opens to a small but beautiful back garden, a row of iceberg roses visible, a nice feature. And then I walked into the kitchen. I stood there and knew: this is where I wanted to cook forever. White painted wood fittings, a black marble top in the prep area with a stainless steel prep bowl, a huge central island with a six burner gas cooker and endless drawers and cupboards, a huge window with a windowsill wide enough for bowls and bowls of lemons, and a scullery with a deep single sink, space for a dishwasher and a washing machine, and opposite. a floor to ceiling grocery and storage cupboard with a blackboard in the central panel. All this opens up to a back stoep with black slate tiles with space for a sofa or two or another long table for lazy alfresco dinners.

My lover took one look at my blissful expression and asked: “shall I put in an offer?” And I would have swooned in his arms if the estate agent had not been looking on…

My thoughts inevitably turned to the kitchens of my childhood. The kitchen of my mother’s mother was the first kitchen I can remember. We usually entered that house from the kitchen door, which had a creaky swingy steel and mesh outer door: long before crime awareness necessitated ugly security doors. She had two stoves, that grandmother of mine: an electric stove with three plates, side by side with an ancient squat black coal stove, the coal delivered weekly in that same predawn time when the milkman used to do his rounds. I remember black men in overalls, their dark skins blackened further by coal dust, coming in by the unlocked squeaky back gate, sacks of shiny black coal over their shoulders, and dumping it in a cloud of black dust into the coal shed at the back of the house. To my little girl’s mind they seemed exotic,  as if they belonged in a different world to mine: which of course they did in those years of apartheid; but I think I had the coal men mixed up in my head with the chimney sweep images from Mary Poppins…

I remember her kitchen to be huge, but now, looking back, I guess it was a modest kitchen: the sink off to one side in front of the only window, looking out onto the back courtyard, a grey formica table with six formica chairs around it: the chairs were all different colours: white, grey, yellow, blue, red, and green. I sometimes see those chairs in vintage shops. But that table was where we sat having midweek dinners after driving from the adjacent town where my parents bought a house in in the early sixties. That is also the table where rows of date loaves were set to cool: she was in inveterate baker, and once a month she baked for the church bazaar: date loaves, swiss rolls, chocolate cakes. She baked her own bread too, but it was my grandfather’s job to knead the dough in huge pale  cream enamelled bowls with green edging. She had special cloths, made from bleached flour bags, which covered the smooth shiny dough as it rose in the heat of a kitchen where the coal stove always seemed hot.

There was a pantry at the far end of this kitchen, where tins of home baked cookies and fat white boere-rusks stood stacked, and thick glass bottles where ginger beer would sometimes be brewing. Overenthusiastic dosage with sugar and yeast would regularly cause a cork to pop with a heart-stopping bang. Usually though she would send us to buy little packets of Kool-Aid from the café round the corner, and she would mix it in a glass jar, the ice cubes clanging melodically and announcing that we could come and get our glassful…

My other grandmother’s kitchens(she was married to a mine captain and lived in several mine houses until they bought their own modest home right next to my parents’ equally modest house) were always very plain: her final kitchen small, with sixties style fittings, electric stove, and yet another formica table, but an oval one, in the center. I sat with her at that table many many times, listening to stories, having cups of tea..

The kitchen of my childhood home did not have a formica table, but a solid round pine table, with 6 cottage style pine chairs, where we used to have all our weekday dinners. The smarter dining room table was reserved for Sunday lunches: the food would be served from the kitchen though, through an interleading doorway.

I know that my mother would have loved to have had a large modern kitchen, and maybe so would both my grannies: I don’t know for sure. But what remains in my memory most of all is the meals lovingly prepared in even those modest, rather basic kitchens I grew up with, so that the prospect of having a wonderful kitchen fills me with gratitude and excitement, but also a necessary recognition that it is not a requirement for making memorable meals and memories..

Which does not mean that I will not love every minute in that new kitchen that hopefully awaits! I may even be persuaded to post a photograph or two here!!

I had been racking my brain to remember the word my mom used for her wonderful creations from leftovers, as I had been musing about in my previous blog. And then last Friday night, my brothers and I and our families met for a pre-Christmas dinner at a beautiful restaurant: long tables under African olive trees, fairy lights strung in some of them, chunky baroque-ish chandeliers dripping with candles,  the murmur of voices in the evening air mingling with live music (sometimes there is jazz, that night a blue-grassy trio). A lovely setting for intimate romantic dinners for two, and special birthday celebrations, and family get-togethers, and possibly weddings: hmm, I must find out.

After the usual pleasantries and catching up, we started talking about our parents, both who are now gone from this earth, and I asked then: “What did mom used to call the dishes she made from leftovers?”, and in unison, both my brothers said, without hesitation:”Konkoksie!”: Concoction in English. And then I remembered, ah, yes, that is the word!

Concoction: hearing the word again conjured up for me a whole range of leftover dishes, mostly in taste memories, not really actual recipes. No risotto balls deep fried with leftover rice, nor panzanella with old stale bread, no bread soup like the French panades, but stews with sliced up leftover topside beef and tomatoes and onion, fishcakes from mashed potato and tinned sardines, savoury rice with sausage and peppers…

I had never really thought about my mother as a brilliant cook: she did not really ever experiment much with different styles of cooking and unusual ingredients, which now upon reflection, was probably more a product of being married to a very conservative eater (my dad) and also not having an unlimited food budget to feed a family of six on. But she did love cooking and food enough to after we had left home, get involved in catering for Matric dances and Rapportryer (that will give away my early environment!) dinners together with a group of women in the small town I grew up in. The “Damesvereniging”. And I remember the accolades from successful such occasions, and how she loved it when guests had clearly enjoyed the food.

How she fed us all on my father’s teacher’s salary I do not know: she worked in my high school years as a school secretary, which certainly helped money wise. I grew up with Sunday lunches where there always was a roast: beef, or chicken, or pork; and three vegetables and a salad AND pudding! And weeknights there would be a variety of meals: her version of spaghetti bolognaise (savoury more than tomato-y mince), macaroni/cheese, frikkadels and vegetables, fat sausages bursting with flavour and mashed potato and salad, fishcakes, lamb stews: I cannot remember any dearth of food or variety at the table of my childhood.

How she did all of this from once a month grocery shopping I also don’t quite know. Of course meat and veggies were bought fresh from our local butcher and greengrocer. The meat wrapped in brown paper and tied with string would make a solid slapping sound when she put it down on the kitchen counter, I remember. But once a month there was a veritable trek to the supermarket: actually our town only got a supermarket when I was in early high school, but my mom preferred going to a brand new Pick n Pay just opened in our adjacent town, where she would sometimes get flustered at the variety and busyness, and would come home having forgotten to get some staple or another. This epic shop would usually take place on a Saturday morning, and sometimes me and my sister were allowed to go with. But I loved it when our family car drove slowly back into the driveway, and she got out and started bringing the ubiquitous supermarket packets (not much changed) out of the boot into the house.  Last carried out was always a paper packet of freshest, soft white hot dog rolls, and she would keep one of the packets of red skinned Vienna sausages out (the others went into the freezer) and after everything was packed away and after a cup of tea, she would make a heap of hot dogs dripping with tomato ketchup and bright yellow mustard from a squeezy bottle: our Saturday lunch treat on the day of the grocery shop.

Even though I do weekly trips to my local shops, and have an incredible variety of produce to choose from, and my recipe repertoire is vast compared to hers (bar for leftovers!!), I’m sure my mom felt equally  satisfied  and maybe even a bit triumphant when she did, like I do now, carry packets laden with food into my house to cook for loved ones: