Cape Town - Mustard and pork go together like a horse and carriage, love and marriage, a car and a garage. Unless you pronounce garridge “garaaage”, in which case half of Britain (especially the northern half) would look askance at you in the way a former Yorkshire colleague of mine in the UK did when I mentioned Nestlé chocolates in her presence, pronounced nest-lay, as we do in South Africa.
She’s a splendid woman called Jeannie Knight who’s as no-nonsense as they come. She has an inbuilt BS detector that can pick up pretentiousness like an air traffic controller can pick up the blip of a far-off plane on radar.
“Nest-lay!?” she barked. “It’s nessles! For God’s bloody sake!”
“Okay,” I replied in a small voice, having got to know Jeannie well by then, and also having long ago learnt from my Yorkshire cousins that to stand up to a Yorkshireman or woman is pointless. You are not going to win.
Being the son of a Yorkshireman who had a peculiarly Yorkshire approach to pronunciation, I had long been inured to this. My dad pronounced mature as “may-tcher”, and no amount of arguing with or teasing him would change his mind. “Don’t be daft, it’s may-tcher,” he’d say, and that was that. And daft, of course, rhymed with faffed, not with laughed. Well, laughed was also pronounced to rhyme with faffed, in his book.
I nevertheless did not think that my dad’s way with pronunciation cut the mustard. I had words and their meanings, and how to say them, pulsing through my veins and I knew that I would be the one in the family to make a living from words.
But I don’t knock the Yorkshire way – far from it. It strikes me as more than a dialect; it’s a way of thinking, a way of life. The more traditional Yorkshireman still says thee and thou for you and, well, you. Even thy and thine for your and yours. Even if they are almost all pronounced “thi” and “tha”. “Hast tha’ sin our Taw-neh?”, I learnt, would translate as, “Have you seen our Tony?”. Only the “h” would be silent. There is no point in wasting breath on unnecessary consonants, and no self-respecting Yorkshireman or woman would be seen dead pronouncing such a silly letter of the alphabet. “H” does not cut the mustard. And that’s that.
Having said that, “to cut the mustard”, like that frightfully British phrase, “stiff upper lip”, is not English at all, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but American. And if OED says so, it must be true, no? But I doubt that would impress a Yorkshireman.
Funny, I’ve often thought, how the English think of mustard as an English thing, and the Germans think of it as a German thing. Maybe they have more in common than either nation would have liked to admit back in the day when my dad and his two brothers signed up for the British navy, army and air force respectively in 1939. That all three survived was remarkable – three brothers in one family surviving Hitler, almost unheard of. But they did, and I eventually met my two uncles, not long before their deaths in their eighties. Charlie, after whom I’m named (Anthony is my second name) and my beloved Granville, after whom I named a character in one of my plays.
Because of this background, and having been born only a few years after the end of hostilities, when rations were still in place and my parents and older brother had shipped out to southern Namibia (then South West Africa), I grew up having an inbred distrust of Germany and its people, quite sure that at any moment World War III could break out and it would be my turn to go off into the trenches. In time, of course, you grow up, your attitudes soften, and you travel, think and form your own adult ways and opinions; and you hear of conflagrations in all corners of the world and learn that it’s a human condition, and that people can fight the demon of nationalism or factionalism and defeat it; or at least not allow it to defeat them or their commonsense.
I ask myself, sometimes, if I cut the mustard as a free-thinker and a liberal, and whether there remain deepseated antipathies to my parents’ old foes. I like to think not.
Whatever the truth, in honour of the peace that remains between my parents’ country and their one-time enemy, here’s a recipe for eisbein – made with English mustard.
Eisbein
1 smoked eisbein each
1 onion
3 bay leaves
6 peppercorns
6 cloves
Cold water to cover
4 tbs mustard
4 tbs honey or molasses
Red cabbage, shredded
1 red onion, sliced
Olive oil or butter
1 tsp ground ginger
Place the pork hock (that’s the eisbein, fräulein Daisy) in a large pot and cover with cold water. Add a chopped onion, bay leaves, cloves and peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and cook for one-and-a-half to two hours. Top up with boiling water if necessary.
Pour off the water, drain and leave to cool. Spoon some stock into a saucepan – the quantity depends on how much sauce you need and how many people you’re servng. To this, add 2 Tbs honey and 2 Tbs mustard, whisk and simmer until it reduces to a pourable sauce.
Mix 2 Tbs honey with 2 Tbs mustard. Remove the thick skin and discard. Glaze the hock with the mustard and honey. Without seasoning (it has enough salt of its own), cook in a preheated 180°C oven for 15 minutes.
Sauté sliced red onion in oil or butter with red cabbage, season with salt, pepper and ground ginger, or cook it in a wok. Raise a glass of Weisser riesling, and tuck in.
Alternatively, make a cross-cultural soup: a proper, thick Yorkshire pea soup made in a large pot with a rather German pork hock in it. That’ll be reet good, that will.
Weekend Argus