from Unite Against Hunger Plate Campaign
Image: Fairlady

Suddenly, the polisher would fall silent and unadulterated Amália would fill our Pretoria home. Inevitably, I'd be reading in my bedroom after school, but I knew what my mother would be doing. She'd be seated on the edge of the 1970s couch (re-upholstered in her choice of gaudy gold brocade) with her head bowed and eyes closed. The upright old Hoover would be lying almost prostrate, my mom's foot resting on the red lever that allowed the slender handle to tilt backwards from its bulky head.

Some fados do that to you. So powerful is their spell, you can't help but surrender. For that moment, I knew my mom was back home in Portugal. Maybe it was her village in Aljustrel or the streets of bustling Lisbon. Was she wishing she was back in that Portuguese casa? The one with four whitewashed walls, with a statue of St Joseph above the entrance, a few grapes, two roses in the garden, an eternally spring-like sun, and two arms that are waiting with the promise of kisses... Ah, this is truly a Portuguese house! – a translation of the lyrics on the back of Amália at the Paris Olympia, the only LP my mother owned.

The only way she could take us – her children and husband – to this place, was to expose us to its unique cuisine and flavours. She gently tried to coax our palates into appreciating Portuguese food. And by 'our' I mean more my brothers' and mine. My father's culinary preferences were too difficult, almost impossible to dislocate. He is German and grew up in Berlin. He was (and still is) all sausages, liver spreads, gherkins, stinky cheeses, abendbrot, sauerkraut, salami, kassler, baked cheesecake made with Dr Oetker's delicious smelling and special flavour-enhancing powders, whipped cream and strong coffee. At suppertime I'd often find him eating pumpernickel with various toppings, off a small wooden board. He'd cut the bread into neat little squares and pick up each piece with a dainty cocktail fork.

Naturally, caught between these clearly incompatible cuisines, my brother and I opted for the predictability of neutral, bland, unhealthy white middle-class South African 1970s fare – steak and chips, Fray Bentos pies packaged in a tin that could be popped straight into the oven, baked beans on toast with a fried egg on top, tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce with bits of spongy chopped sausage, white toast and Marmite, and anaemic fruit salad in a tin – with one or two pale cherries we would bicker over.

Culinary choices in South Africa in the 1970s were distinctly limited. Apart from our Cypriot neighbours, no-one in our neck of the woods ate olives or even used olive oil. No-one dreamt of using garlic in case they ended up smelling like a Pora or 'those Mediterranean types'.

The only lettuce you could buy at the local grocer was the tasteless iceberg. Tomatoes were all one size, cheese was all yellow, and the salad dressing of choice was pre-mixed and packed with MSG and called Thousand Islands – or simply, 'French'. No risks were taken.

Make no mistake, we were exposed to alternatives. There were always olives in our home. Huge bottles of green and black olives arranged on top of the kitchen cupboard, that had been brought as gifts by one or another of my mom's Portuguese friends. They were certainly not freely available in the average supermarket back then. My mom would eat them for lunch sometimes, dipping chunks of Portuguese bread into the oil. I found olives too pungent and bitter for my adolescent taste. Today, of course, I love them.

Apart from the olives there were also tins and tins of sardines that my mother enjoyed with pao or white bread. In the fridge, next to the brown bottles of beer my father had brewed in the garage, was always a carafe of sweet white wine – taken only with meals and always out of an ordinary kitchen glass.

My mom had no real feel for the strange food my brother and I preferred, but she tried. It all tasted the same somehow and, over time, food became, for me, something I ate when I was hungry; something I did not consume for enjoyment but merely for sustenance.

The benefit of this is that I have never had a weight problem or an obsessive or overwrought relationship with food. The downside is that I have never really experienced the real pleasure of food.

'Iss no man gonna marry you if you looka like dat. You are too tin,' my mother used to complain. She thought I was not fat enough and that I looked 'unhealthy'. Where she came from, buxom is desirable and, in women, a sign of maternal possibility.

My mom died before I became a mom and I wish I had taken the trouble to ask her for some recipes. I would love to feed my family the delicious bacalhau (dried cod) fish cakes she occasionally made. I can close my eyes and smell them frying in the pan. The saltiness, some of which had been washed out as the bacalhau soaked in water the day before, was peculiar to the flavour of this dish.

There are hundreds of regional bacalhau dishes but my mom's, if I remember correctly, was simple: shredded cod mixed with finely chopped onions, garlic, mashed potatoes and parsley. Years later, a macrobiotic Portuguese friend I had met in Holland surprised me with a plate of hot, deep-fried, fish cakes made with bacalhau. My mom's kitchen was immediately conjured to life.

The German culinary influence in my life, too, has been lasting. I still find myself stocking up on gherkins, frankfurters, liver spread, salami and rye bread or pumpernickel. I love the tartness of sauerkraut. I could eat a piled-high plate of it.

Our household has a more integrated cuisine. Most of the meals we cook at home are from my partner's childhood. To me they are strange but delicious combinations, such as chicken and broccoli bake, and haddock and sweetcorn pie. We eat lots of vegetables and fresh fruit.

Every now and again one of the babies will get a craving for gherkins or salami, and I lovingly cut them up for them. I wonder if they'll accept it on a wooden board next time? Perhaps with one or two fish cakes arranged sweetly next to the salami?

Marianne Thamm has worked as a journalist and columnist for more than 20 years – and sometimes as a stand-up comic. Her work appears in a variety of local and international publications, and you can catch her regular (and often hilarious) column, Unfair Comment in Fairlady. Marianne has also ghost-written several books and is a multiple Mondi Award winner.

Image: Craig Fraser