Ashley Green-Thompson Ashley Green-Thompson
There’s a story of a woman diligently following a recipe for roast lamb handed down to her by her mother, and showing her own daughter how to do it. She cuts off the end piece of the leg of lamb before putting it in the oven to roast. The young girl asks why the piece is cut, and the woman says it's because that is what her mother used to do – it's tradition. The daughter’s curiosity is assuaged when the granny visits and is asked about this practice. She cut off the piece to enable the leg of lamb to fit into the small oven of her old stove. And so a family tradition is born.
I love tradition. Every Easter conversations in my community revolve around pickled fish. You shouldn’t leave it too late to prepare as the flavour won’t have time to settle. Catholics – and probably other Christian denominations – abstain from eating meat on Good Friday, so fish becomes the replacement. But why pickle it? It seems that in the old Cape Colony Malay fishermen would sell loads of snoek fish to Christians observing Lent around March and April, but back then there weren’t fridges to keep the stuff fresh. The Dutch were already pickling herring, but the people brought in as enslaved and indentured labour from the other colonies brought their spices with them. Thank goodness for that – the turmeric and bay leaves and peppercorns are much more mouthwatering than the salt and vinegar of the Dutch.
