I didn’t hear of the word BBQ/barbecue till many years later. The only word I knew was the South African word “braaivleis”, either a purpose-built stone “tower”, or a clean 44-gallon oil drum cut in half, with a grid placed above the smouldering wood at or in its base. Sausages were wonderful spicy South African beef “boerewors”. I didn’t know what a hot dog was, other than literally and had never eaten such a processed-sausage-in-a-bun until my husband and I came to Canada. We didn’t like them at all.
What else did we enjoy in Darwendale? So many things that we had never seen in our lives till then! We children loved the sweet fried, twisted, sugar-coated donuts called “koeksisters”. We sucked and chewed with great relish sticks of sugar cane to extract the juice. We ate “biltong”, dark pieces of salty dried beef which looked like shreds of shriveled bark. We devoured juicy “mealies” (corn on the cob) which my mother grew in our back yard, though we never made from them the porridge-like “sadza” which was a staple of the African diet. We enjoyed a curried minced beef meat dish, “bobotie”, made with milk, eggs, and sultanas and baked in the oven, and fruit we had never heard of, let alone eaten. We loved the variety of fruit which we could often buy from African roadside sellers: enormous watermelons; fruit somewhat like clementines or mandarins, called “naartjies”; large papaya which we knew only as “pawpaw”; guavas, grenadillo and mangoes. We bit into the latter’s stringy flesh, causing a juicy mess to run down our chins. By the time only the stone in the middle was left, we had so many strings caught between our teeth that it was uncomfortable. We had to pull or pick them out with great difficulty at times. We were careful not to stain our clothing, though, because it didn’t take us long to discover the permanent effects of mango juice. To this day, my brother John claims that the only sensible place to eat an African mango, is in the bathtub!
On one occasion we bought from a roadside seller “a pocket” (a large string bag) of fresh oranges and ate so many that the entire family turned into almost instantaneous wind bags, emitting the most appalling smells for days on end, as we ran back and forth to and from the PK (“piccanin kia” = small house = toilet). After that episode, we curtailed our appetites eating only one orange per day. Of course, no self-respecting child would ever peel an orange! That just wasn’t done by the younger generation. No, instead, we children adopted the habit of our peers at school, whom John and I had seen many a time throwing a whole orange repeatedly against a wall until the orange was a soft, mushy mess inside, although the skin remained intact. Then using our teeth, we would, like our school mates, pierce a small hole into the peel and suck out the juice from inside, squeezing the orange like a soft palpable ball. It was our version of a carton of fruit juice which at that point didn’t exist, as far as I know. With all the juice consumed, we would open the peel till it was flat, and then pull off the somewhat desiccated segments of flesh which we would eat last of all.
