My mother (bless her bones – not that she’s got any, we cremated her when she snuffed it) was never boring.
Take her cooking. Any normal mother would feed the kids on chicken soup, loads of veg, hamburger, pizza, toasted sandwiches and milk. Dull stuff, but children like it.
But not MY mother, oh no. She’d put her glasses on the end of her nose and scrutinise the recipe book, smeared with the makings of a thousand peculiar meals.
“Ok, darlings,” She’d say to us kids. “Let’s have grilled kingklip with cheese sauce, croquette potatoes and petit pois for supper, followed by crème caramel.”
“Hmm. We’ll have to make some creative changes to the recipe…no kingklip….not surprising here in Darkest bloody
Africa. A bit far from the sea for that – god, how I’d love a fresh oyster! The taste of the sea! Oh well. We’ll get some kapenta from Kabwe’s shop. It’ll be the same thing.”
My sister and I would glance at each other meaningfully. We hated kapenta. Smelly, salty little heaps of dried fish with their eyes and guts still in, stinking like Christ knew what. Maybe the three-week-old unwashed underpants of an ageing sumo wrestler who doesn’t bother to shake it dry after use. Not in the least like kingklip. We’d see how we could scupper and de-supper THAT idea.
“Ok, potato croquettes. Not potato, it’s so dull. We’ll have yam instead. After all if Caesar adsum iam forte, we can have some for supper. And Pompei aderat, so be grateful for the kapenta, girls. We’ll mix the yam with some nsima. I’ll just put more maize meal in, to make it stiffer. Cheese sauce…we’ll use powdered egg instead of cheese… Just add a little turmeric to make it yellower…there, it looks just like, doesn’t it, girls?”
Don’t even ask about the crème caramel.
This is the same mother who made soup from lucerne, a kind of leguminous cattle fodder. OK, it was delicious, but still. We wanted hotdogs, not hot savoury green milkshake made of cow food.
This is the same mother who blithely served raw tilapia got from experimental fish station to her guests and family. “It’s delicious and exotic, girls,” she said. “It’s been soaked for 24 hours in lemon juice, so it’s as good as cooked.” My sister and I still huddle together over coffee, repeatedly unpacking that bit of parental violence to our psyches. We still haven’t healed.
So is it surprising that my own children refuse to eat my cooking? I’ve taught them well never to trust an adult with a saucepan.
As they might remark, in their sarcastic but kindly way, my food is antithetical to their enjoyment.
