ROAST COUSIN SURPRISE
Outside the dining room in our childhood home was a wild pear tree that dropped its fruit in summer, fruit that rotted on the ground, squished satisfyingly underfoot and filled the air with a heady decadent scent that suited the goings on inside the dining room. Which were mostly jolly and noisy with the rare occasional silence broken by the sound of a wild pear dropping from the big tree outside. So rare in fact, that I only really remember it once.
We ate all our evening meals by candlelight since my mother Tana refused to have electricity in the dining room because it was “vulgar”. On weekends we seldom got fed because the dining room was commandeered by talking, drinking, eating, laughing grownups. During the week, however, we went on a culinary exploration unheard of in the Jozi suburbs. While everyone else was having TV dinners or takeaways — new phenomena then — our palates were being tested on a range of dishes from France, Italy, the Middle East, North Africa, the Caribbean, China and beyond.
That’s because Tana went to endless cooking lessons — returning flushed, jolly and inspired — and produced an extraordinary pageant of dishes. We had Spanish paella, New Orleans clam bakes, Italian fondue evenings, French cassoulêt, pâté, roulade, Moroccan chicken baked in a mud casing, once even a real suckling pig with an apple in its mouth.
This dish wholly captivated the attention of my older brothers Steven and Brett, who were fascinated by all things dark and outlandish. Which the pig was indeed, served in a chiaroscuro medieval light.
“Why did it have the apple in its mouth?” they wanted to know at once.
“Oh darlings,” said our mother mysteriously, “in the process of roasting the pig’s jaws tighten into a ghastly grimace and the apple just softens the look.”
She then offered the more practical and ghoulish news that the pig’s mouth had to be kept open while cooking to release its internal gases which may otherwise affect the taste of the dish. “Sizzling piggy’s tummy gas — eeurgh, aaargh,” shrieked Steve with delight, while Brett gave an evil cackle. This dish resonated with the boys in an unnatural way.
But our mother never noticed. She was planning Christmas lunch, which was at our house that year. The roast suckling pig was the pièce de résistance of the year at cooking school and she was planning to serve it at Christmas with great aplomb, never mind an apple in its mouth. “Would you like to help me serve it?” she asked the boys, who seemed very pleased at the idea.
Our many relatives were all seated at the dining-room table, the vague scent of rotting wild pears mingling pleasantly with the smell of roasting and baking. Everyone had thoroughly enjoyed their first course which was something none of us had ever heard of. “And now for the suckling pig,” yelled my mother, typically one glass of wine ahead of everyone else, as she rang the silver bell. Yes, we actually had a silver bell.
And that was when the kitchen door opened with a great cloud of steam and my brothers brought in on their shoulders a big brass tray — with our younger cousin Tammy crouched on it, flushed and giggling in a muffled way around the apple in her mouth. I remember the collective intake of breath and her parents’ horrified faces . . . and then the sound of a wild pear falling to the ground.