|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Calvin Trillin discusses regional food fetishes
From 1972, Trillin reports from a Louisiana crawfish festival
From 1977, Trillin hunts barbecued lamb in Kentucky
My friend Jeffrey Jowell, who grew up in Cape Town, has lived away from South Africa for more than forty years, yearning for snoek the entire time. He thinks about fried snoek and grilled snoek and dried snoek and snoek made into pate. He may miss smoked snoek most of all. Any mention of snoek--a long, bony fish that looks like a second cousin of a barracuda--triggers memories in Jeffrey of his childhood, particularly of the stern interrogation of fishmongers that was part of his late mother's search for a specimen up to the standards of her dinner table. "Is it pap?" Emily Jowell would demand, using an Afrikaans word for soft. "Does it have worms?" I knew Jeffrey's mother. She was a small woman, but she brooked no nonsense. I can well believe that, even in the days when snoek was normally purchased from a fisherman at the dock or from somebody leading a horse-drawn cart through town, the roughest seller would have wilted when subjected to her gaze. If his snoek had been out of the water too long--snoek is an oily fish, with flesh somewhat similar to mackerel, so "too long" comes quite quickly--he might have hesitated for a moment, and then looked at the ground while admitting to Jeffrey's mother, in a remarkably soft voice for someone who had just been shouting from the middle of the street to draw attention to his wares, that it might be a bit pap after all. When the subject of snoek comes up these days, Jeffrey sometimes repeats his mother's questions, as a sort of mantra: Is it pap? Does it have worms?
It would be tempting to say that snoek is Jeffrey's madeleine, but I don't think that would give full measure to his suffering. After all, Proust, who lived in Paris, could score a madeleine any time he wanted to. Since 1970, when Jeffrey moved to London permanently, he has lived a good six thousand miles from the nearest snoek. Before that, he lived for several years in North America, at a distance from snoek waters so overwhelming that a less resilient man might have been thrown into a deep depression. Also, Proust presumably lived among people who had pleasant childhood memories of madeleines. Jeffrey has not had a similar experience in London. In the years just after the Second World War, when food shortages were still a serious problem in Great Britain--rationing lasted until 1954--canned snoek was imported from South Africa as a cheap source of protein, and, to quote a reference book called "The Encyclopedia of Southern...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
