the corner office

Ronwen decided to go all South African and made frikkadels tonight. For non-South African readers, frikkadels are just meatballs, but Ronwen thought it was quite funny when I said that when and where I grew up, if you said you were having 'meatballs' for dinner people would think you were nuts or too posh to call them frikkadels. There is no such thing as a 'meatball' north of the Drakensberg. I digress.

In tracking down a recipe and scouring some South African recipe websites, Ronwen introduced me to what seems to be a new term for tomato and onion gravy: train smash. What a delightful expression. I'd never heard it referred to that way before - I've always known it to be tomato & onion gravy or just 'sauce', or 'sous' if you were in an Afrikaans mood. I wondered where this seemingly new term came from, and Ronwen speculated that it might be an African term that's gained common usage. This sounds quite feasible, given the macabre but brilliant township slang used for other things: walkie-talkies (chicken heads and feet), smileys (a sheep's head), and half-smileys (yep, half a sheep's head).

Am I just out of touch though? For how long as the term 'train smash' been in circulation, and where did it come from?

Update: quick web search turned up a suggestion that it has a military and/or Australian origin. It's still a great name!