Unless you grew up celebrating Thanksgiving or have lived in the U.S. for a while, this annual holiday can feel pretty novel. You see it in movies and TV shows, of course, with the obligatory family feuds, grocery stores turned gladiator arenas and other food-related disasters that make the protagonists realize that the only thing they need on Thanksgiving is the power of friendship. While growing up in South Africa, I never gave much thought to Thanksgiving, barring what I saw on TV, but my family and I have been joining the celebrations — in our own way — for some time.
I moved to the U.S. when I was 19-years-old, almost five years ago now, and Thanksgiving rolled around a few short months after we finally settled down. We decided to do Thanksgiving in celebration of our new lives here, together, as we looked forward to new opportunities that we didn’t have back in South Africa. I honestly don’t know who thought this would be a good idea because my family could star in their own sitcom full of awkward dinners and shouting matches across the table. Someone mumbles one snarky thing about how they don’t like cranberry sauce, and it all goes downhill from there.
We’ve gotten better at the whole family dinner ritual, since then. I think it helps that most of us kids are away at university now; we have our own lives, responsibilities and other adult stuff, so when we do gather around a table again, it’s to catch up and reminisce, instead of annoy the living daylights out of one another. We’ve also gotten better at the whole food thing. When we first made Thanksgiving dinner, we tried to copy the most traditional recipes — turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, you know the drill — before we started incorporating South African dishes into the mix as well. I’m biased, but really, there is no American dish that tops the food I grew up eating.
South Africa has a vibrant range of popular dishes, influenced by a diverse indigenous population, along with Asian and European flavors from the Netherlands, Britain, France and India. With an Afrikaans family that can trace their ancestry to early Dutch settlers, we often enjoy European style desserts like malva pudding, a sweet and sticky sponge made with apricot jam and soaked in a creamy caramel sauce; or melktert, a tart-like pastry filled with milk custard (I guess Thanksgiving does have one thing in common with South African food… it’s colonialism). On the savory side, we have dishes like bobotie, an aromatic mixture of minced meat, dried fruit and spices topped with a milk and egg mixture that becomes firm in the oven, or a chunky tomato-based sauce served with maize porridge and South African style barbecued meat.
While I’m willing to throw down the gauntlet and fight my brothers for the last slice of pecan pie and I’m not shy about heaping my plate with sweet potato casserole, there is something about traditional food from home that makes Thanksgiving special in my family. We call the U.S. home now too, and we will be enjoying the best of both countries, this coming week.