bossa popsi

When Pops was still a house-husband in my early years of primary school, he had a small, yet sturdy handful of traditional recipes he cooked us in our tiny kitchen. They were the kind of recipes you didn’t need a recipe for; the kind that I imagine he ate as a child and was taught by his mum, so most of them were hearty Belgian classics involving mostly potatoes – maybe this is why Mother rarely ate with us. At the time, we still lived in the old house all the way up the hill. Pops, my two elder siblings and I would cramp around the small white table every night to shovel in some grub whilst we fidgeted around on the uncomfortably cold, mismatched metal stools from Ikea that always left a neat pattern of circles on your bum.

My favourite was Saucisse-Compote. This is the only time I would have ketchup on my plate – it’s normally all about the mayo. Brits know this meal as bangers and mash, but somehow, it just isn’t the same thing. Papa would always barbecue these little individual Catherine wheel sausages held together by a wooden skewer, and there isn’t anyone I know that makes mash as buttery or creamy as he does. What really made it, though, was the compote: homemade with apples from the farm across the field, served piping hot. Funny thing is, I never really liked apple sauce, but I’ve always adored Pops’ compote.

Years later, our roles inverted. Papa now had an office job, the siblings had dispersed across the globe, and mother was still the same. Despite my innate need to be a teenager that was hardly ever home, I still treasured the scarce time I spent in the house, as it was mostly with Pops or in my red Fat Boy watching MTV. The kitchen that had once felt so puny and crowded was now seldomly home to family memories. But on the odd occasion it was used, it was now me who cooked for Pops. Though I never quite did them justice, I kept his traditional recipes on rotation with a selection of my own. I remember one night, he came home early to pick up a parcel. The table was all nicely set – bar the Ikea stools – and dinner was on the hob waiting to be served: our new favourite tradition of chopped up sausages in pesto pasta. Très, très sophistiqué.

Pops waddled into the kitchen carrying a brown box and the biggest grin on his face, the kind a little boy gets with a new set of Lego. He’d barely set the box down before giddily tearing past layers of Styrofoam until he revealed a rectangular black box with a large dial. He fiddled around for a while, occasionally dropping an impatient sigh. Eventually, he looked up from it as he turned the dial, releasing a suave little ditty into the air, and he told me in his speech voice that it was, in fact, an internet radio. While the candle flames danced to the soothing vibrations of Caetano Veloso’s guitar, I listened attentively as Pops recounted the story of his affection for Bossa Nova. He was never much of a talker, yet I had devoured a generous second helping before he was even halfway through his first. That night, just as velvety as Gilberto’s voice, Pops recited his own type of concerto as the black oval box exhaled breaths of jazzy chords into the background.