Getting just the right bite and taste for the love of humanity

IT WAS everywhere. Smoked into your hair, your clothes. The smell of fish marinating in a smothering of bay leaves, jeera, fish masala and koljander, pepper-corn. It flagged, like the many-coloured strikkies outside the Klopsekamers of the carnival, a joyous something-to-come.

It seeped, this pungent herald of Good Friday, from steamy kitchens crowded with cooks and their conscripted helpers.

Lynnette Johns has been required by her mother from childhood days to “to taste the pickle bit of the pickled fish”. This requires a delicate palate, a sense of propor- tion: “The balance between sweet, sour, salt and curry powder cannot be underestimated... the onion must have a satisfying bite to it, not too raw and definitely not boiled to a slush.”

This week, the most holy season in the Christian liturgical calendar, bonds, at least on a kitchen-table basis, Muslims and Christians. In these days when the Arabic “shukran” for “thank you” has mostly displaced the Melayu “tra’makasie”, markers of our shared slave ancestry, this aspect of Cape culture is to be cherished.

On taxis and trains unsolicited opinions were offered about where to buy the best fish. Some have laybyed boxes of frozen hake from a connection at I& J. Advice was sought about whether snoek is the best fish for pickle. This companion dish to the humble patat is favoured by those who enjoy sucking the marrow out of the snoek’s long, backbone. Filleted-hake is preferred by families with children, and of course yellowtail by the connoisseurs. Its fleshy texture absorbs the spices and metterjalas better than all the other fish in the sea.

Cooking on Good Friday was frowned upon and pickled fish served at room temperature fulfilled the needs of the busy church-goer. Our family had black coffee and hotcross buns without butter for breakfast. My siblings and I would attend the 9am children’s service at St Andrew’s, Eureka Estate.

We’d stand in line before a cross to pray before it in silence and touch our lips to its wooden smoothness. A sign of our devotion to Jesus. We would return later for the threehour service. Finally, at about 3.30pm, we’d gather around the kitchen table for that longed- for plate of pickled fish.

By Easter Sunday your body cried out for relief as your taste buds anticipated the Easter roast lamb.

The Good Friday pickled fish, like the kifyaat meal served at Muslim funerals, is a sacramental sym- bol of acceptance expressed communally. Of love. This experience invites us to look at God from the place of universal woundedness, from a culture of liefde en jammerte.

God is present like a mother’s love in the broken, tortured body of his son and similarly in the way we defy the contradictory faith-based division of our lives.

Surely God, who was there at the dawn of creation “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy”, smiles when he sees, us his children, delight in the social feasts of our humanity.