Haere ra Mr Verkerk and reminiscence of growing up

Haere ra Mr Verkerk and reminiscence of the growing up.

One thing we knew about in our household was when Aunty Beryl was coming to stay. Half a pig’s head would appear in the kitchen. It was time to make brawn. Mum made brawn with lots of aspic. I grew up in family were you had to eat everything on your plate. As kids we hated brawn. There were five kids in our family; we had an extending dining table. This meant there were rails underneath where the extension slid along. These ledges were a good spot for hiding the brawn. It would be collected after the meal and tossed over the
fence onto the neighbour’s bank.

I used to go tramping with my mates. We would go the supermarket to buy food for the trip. Dave was more worldly than I, he used to say why don’t we buy salami. So we did. This was a new culinary experience for me. I liked it, it was something different to eat, looking back on it, it was my first exposure to salami and more exotic sausages.    

This brings me to the point of this posting.

In Saturday’s Dominion Post the obituary of Aalt Verkerk appeared.  He was aged 89. Verkerk’s salami and smallgoods have been made in Christchurch, New Zealand for decades. He arrived in NZ in 1952 from the Netherlands, worked as a butcher and then started his own business. This business now employs 200 people. The salami range in Woolworth’s Supermarket in Tawa in the late seventies was not large. Verkerk’s salami was
the stock salami. So it was sad to read of the founder of the company death, however his contribution to NZ’s barren cuisine of 1970s suburbia is appreciated.