My Accent & Obatzda

Light vandalism of a cheese spread. My older brother Andrew has been auditing my accent for years. Every visit home adds a new entry to the ledger. A word I now say the British way, a phrase that doesn't make sense in Canada, and the little skeptical note at the end of a sentence that he swears wasn't there in 2009. I recently came back from two weeks with the Canadian side of the family last month, and somewhere inside his latest analysis I realised he had a point. My parents and grandparents assimilated into Canadian life back in the 60s because they felt they had to. There was a decision made and effort put behind it. In contrast, I moved to Wales and assimilated into Welshness without actively deciding anything at all. Yet somehow, I arrived at a very similar place. The accent is the last thing holding the line. Take that away and I would pass a British sniff test without breaking a sweat. How I cook, what I watch, the subconscious things I do, all of it crossed over while I was looking elsewhere. What unsettles me is how little resistance it took. Nobody set out to change me, and nothing felt like it was taken either. It was just the absorption of an environment I happened to live in. I get a lot of emails from people saying that the Germanness their community used to carry has thinned out. They say it like a confession for letting it slip, or as an accusation of those who didn't try hard enough. But really, most of it is the same slow process I keep finding in my own mirror, and it has nothing to do with caring less. This is why the small deliberate things matter more than they should. On the other end of the spectrum, I've met German-Canadians who wouldn't admit to trying to hold on to anything at all. And yet, there is always a dish that only appears on certain occasions, or a holiday they keep marking on a calendar in a country that has never heard of it. None of it is for show. It's just a thread they hold onto. There is a flip side to this that I've been working on, and it's in the newsletter going out next week. People like me spend years losing cultural labels by accident. However, most Americans unknowingly keep some of these traditions alive and don't know it by name. I won't give it away here… that's for next week. My own thread I'm clutching, it turns out, is a cheese spread. Obatzda was one of the first German recipes I made properly my own, and I did to it exactly what life has been doing to me. It comes out about eighty percent Bavarian and twenty percent my Canadian inability to leave a smoky flavor alone. It's either a respectful adaptation or light vandalism depending on how Bavarian you are. It also happens to be very good next to a grill on a warm evening. Recipe here → Smoky Obatzda, the Bavarian beer garden classic with a Canadian liberty taken Andrew may not be sold on my accent, but I think he would agree on the added smoke. The recipe is one of the few things I changed on purpose. For the rest of me, I will go on blaming it on the weather and driving on the wrong side of the road.

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My Accent & Obatzda

Light vandalism of a cheese spread.

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