Recipes, love, and forgetting: a sparse domestic archive from colonial Natal

This essay uses the genre of creative nonfiction to tell the story of two particular women, and to explore the inextricable relations between femininity, food and love as experienced in one family who lived in a neighbourhood of colonial Natal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning as a conversation with the speaker’s ageing and forgetful mother, the narrative becomes an attempt to discover more about her mother, Madge Smallie. In the process, it unpacks a small domestic archive in which the only published books are a colonial recipe book and an early feminist novel, and the only words written in Madge’s hand are recipes for food and domestic preparations.