You know that one thing that you absolutely hate eating because when growing up, your mom made you eat it all the time? It could be any occasion: “Hey, we’re broke so we have to eat this” or “Hey this is good for you” or “Hey you’ll eat anything I put on the plate for you”. Sound familiar? I’ve heard from people that theirs is peanut butter, fish paste, canned tuna and someone even said cheese (I was tempted to kill that person), well that food for me is Pilchards in a can. Growing up in South Africa, I knew either these two iconic brands:

They both have different variants like the chilli sauce one and I recently saw that Lucky Star had a sweet chilli variant, but I’m not sure what else they’ve produced. Anyways, this is probably one of the cheapest proteins you’ll find in the shops apart from eggs and it forms a large part of people’s staple diet, especially people of colour.

Now that I am an adult with my own family, grocery shopping includes skipping the above as I ate it so much growing up. But, just when I thought that I had completely erased it from my mind, the app Cookpad announced a competition where you had to cook Pilchards. I took this as an opportunity to not only go back and buy my childhood ‘food nemesis’, but to find different ways of cooking it so I could fall somewhat in love with it. I’d like to think that my cooking skills are far more superior than the typical person.. which they are, so I needed to make these meals a success.

After digging deep into the archives of my brain, yes it was a 30 second thought, I settled on making fish cakes and cottage pie. Both came out amazing, firstly because they were huge in flavour and you couldn’t taste that “taste”. And I out taste in inverted commas because … you know, it’s that taste that makes you hate your childhood foods.

To sum off, here are the recipes. I hope you try them, enjoy them and let me know what you think of them.

Pilchards Fish cakes

Pilchards Cottage Pie