The need for light, warmth and something to cling to the ribs drives me into the kitchen year upon year, as I suspect it does many people.
A few weeks ago, I cooked oxtail using my great grandmother’s recipe, which I don’t think had been used since long before her death 16 years ago.
I discovered light and warmth in abundance in my kitchen that day.
Every step of the process, from preparation to cooking to eating, brought with it the most wonderful of memories – and not just to mind, but to what seemed like every cell in my body.
Days later, while doing some research on a story I’ve yet to write, I asked my grandfather about a well-known space in the city.
He told me how, as a young man in the 1940s, he and his friends would visit this place with its patterned wall tiles regularly because it sold “some of the best pies in town”.
His story stirred up another memory, one of my mother’s stories about a weekly trip to “the tea room at the old OK Bazaars on Eloff Street” for a treat of pie, mash and gravy.
All the food of memory and memories of food got me thinking about my life in the city today.
I have no regular trips for weekly treats, and what I consider a treat is a far cry from the old OK Bazaars’ pie, mash and gravy.
I don’t think I’d be able to describe the patterns on the tiles of any eatery a day after seeing them, never mind 60-something years later.
Perhaps this winter I should try to rediscover some of the simple pleasures in the city, as I eat my way towards summer.
They may make for lasting memories.
