Recipes for Love.

We are not quite post pandemic, but looking at the numbers of people hospitalised and dying in this country from this Omicron variant of The Plague, I’m beginning to be carefully optimistic that life as we knew it two years ago may just be possible again. Not quite, I know. We cannot really ever go back to how it used to be like: experiences alter us, alter our very nervous system, and what are we but a live body, with a solid flesh and blood presence at the total mercy of our nervous system?

So here I am, altered.

Altered forever too by having been invited to join a Facebook group: Lockdown Recipe Storytelling Book, by a writerly friend I’d met a few years ago on a writer’s workshop. I knew immediately what a big deal the invitation was: there I was, a white, late fifties person who loves cooking and writing about memories around food, being invited to join a group which turned out to have been started by Coloured women, for a community of Coloured people mostly in the Cape, mostly but not exclusively Afrikaans speaking, but Kaaps, or roots in Kaaps. I accepted. And found myself in the constant company of people whose “komvandaan”(where I come from) stories were almost identical to mine: except I was white. And privileged. Not privileged in the sense of growing up with money(my father was a school teacher, my mother a secretary), but privileged because I had the advantage of being classified as white at birth in Apartheid South Africa.

But my mother’s mom cooked and baked the same recipes as many fellow Food Fairies(as we’d fondly became known to one another on the group), her father grew veggies in the backyard; my father’s mom had the best recipe for melting moments cookies and always used dried milk powder, his dad polished all their shoes each night: just like many in this group wrote about their parents and grandparents. The same vetkoek: poffertjies. The same pilchard fish cakes. Liver and onion. Koeksisters. Date loaf. Bread. Aniseed biskuit. Frikadelle. Pickled fish.

But I did not know about snoek kuite, or daltjies. The stews I grew up with were bland compared to the complex curries the members of this group write about. The implied, and in moments explicit, (this is not a protest group) memories of being discriminated against are not familiar to me. I grew up white, afrikaans, conservative. There was an apricot tree in our backyard, and a mulberry tree too, and my mom cleaned her own house and we all had chores. I walked to school many times, and back. But I did not know who Nelson Mandela was until I went to university, on a scholarship: my parents were not rich enough to pay Uni fees. I did not know about District Six and forced removals. I did not finish the BSc I registered for: failed maths, turned the degree into a plain bog standard BA with English and Psychology as majors, fell pregnant, got married, did honours in psychology through Unisa, got selected for an MA in psychology eventually. My world opened then and kept on expanding. Ever wider and deeper, finding a new and more awake view of the world, but also of myself in this wounded country as I made my way in my own life: having babies, divorcing, leaving the church, getting remarried, divorcing again: all the time cooking and writing and mothering and working and getting married again and writing about it all and cooking, cooking. And being a therapist: with white afrikaans patients at first, and then coloured, indian, black, asian: english speaking and like me, not speaking our mother tongue as we sat together in a simple room, holding a shared space where our stories became known. The big discovery: we have the same story: with variations forced by time and history and politics and prejudice and skin colour and everything in between.

And as I continue to read posts on the LRSB by fellow Food Fairies, I get closer to having a sense of community and connection than I’ve ever had in my life. I do not even in my own family have this sense of recognition and freedom and welcoming appreciation which all are met with in this FB group where people of all colour and creed and gender share their stories and glories and photographs of family and food. Also of grief and loss and hardships. And recipes.

Recipes for love really.