“Don’t bother asking,” said my father before removing the tea towel from a hunched shape on his kitchen table. “This recipe dies with me.” With a flourish I suspected he’d learned from a cooking show, he whipped away the veil, revealing a small brown oval, pocked at one end with what looked like furious acne, and scarred at the other by a vicious gash. With a mental lurch, I tried to reconcile the smell in the kitchen—the warm, earthy tang of active yeast—with the disfigured lump on the table. My father, the dentist, a man who back in the old country lacked the kitchen skills even to open a can of beans, mistook my bafflement for awe. He stood straight, his hand pointing to the creation, his grey moustache stretched wide over a large, cocksure grin. “How about that, eh?”

For the better part of a decade—since my family’s arrival in Toronto from Johannesburg in December 1989—my father had been on a desperate quest. It was a search that had produced 10 years’ worth of dead ends, too many frustrations to count, the purchase of a bread-making machine in the late ’90s, and now this. My father was looking for something so South African that it could not possibly be found anywhere else. My father was looking for Government Brown.

With its perfectly firm crust, slightly blackened base and nutty, downy-soft interior, Government Brown had few detractors. One could chase half a loaf with a bottle of cold Coca-Cola, as the local blacks did, or hollow out the dough by the fistful and stuff the crust with a curried meat concoction devised in the littoral cafés (pronounced keh-fees) of Natal and called—no one can say why—Bunny Chow. My aunt Velda organized martial rows of sardines on thin-sliced Government Brown; my mother’s specialty was molten, gooey, toasted cheddar cheese and tomato sandwiches. Everyone in our household—our maid, Bushy; our gardener, Manson; even our dog, Chomps—ate at least a hunk a day. My father, however, was the bread’s biggest acolyte—so much so that he happily drove to the corner café every afternoon after work to buy our family’s daily supply. (The only other victual-related task he ever performed was the Sunday afternoon ritual of badly charring meat on the barbecue, or braai.) He never missed a day.

These humble porterman’s loaves were a staple in township shanty and suburban manse alike, at least in part because of the price. In the 1980s, a loaf cost the equivalent of a quarter—this in a country where blacks earned a couple of dollars a day. The bread was heavily subsidized by the apartheid regime, an act of largesse justified with choice passages from the Bible and motivated by Machiavellian self-interest. The black labour class that did the country’s heavy lifting required cheap, high-carbohydrate sustenance; our rulers had no choice but to provide the indigent with the staff of life. And, in a strange twist, even though Government Brown was an industrially made food product used to sustain a bitterly exploited racial underclass, to this day it remains the best industrially made food product I have ever tasted. “Who needs fancy restaurants,” my father would ask between bites smeared with Marmite, “when you have this?” And it was this bread, imbued with such bitter history and coated with the patina of Biblical righteousness, that my father was searching for. His quest began almost as soon as the sliding doors of Pearson’s Terminal 2 opened onto our icy new world.