London Letter: Biltong a key element in changing culinary trends

As a kid, I could eat anything – a product of boarding school where fried eggs were more rubbery than a beach ball and sago tasted worse than the frogs eggs it resembled.

On more than a couple of occasions school grub was semi-toxic with mass outbreaks of gyppo guts, and the trick was not only how fast you could sprint to the toilet, but how to block several dozen other kids speeding in the same direction.

Not everyone made it.

Consequently a culinary treat for us was sneaking out to a Hillbow café and ordering Russian sausage and chips fried in enough oil to go to war over.

Then as an aspiring journalist, bar snacks were considered haute cuisine, and the fact that the staff canteen of one newspaper I worked for was busted by the hygiene police for serving green curry (the colour of the meat, not the Thai version) also contributed to my cast-iron stomach.

But times have changed. For the first time, I am now interested in what I am eating.

Two things brought this about.

Firstly, when you are fishing for the pot, you are witnessing your quarry’s last minutes on earth. And I can tell you this, most fish fight harder for their birthright than the effete politicians of the West do for their cultural heritage that is being sold for less than a mess of pottage.

I thus prize a meal of trout blackened Cajun-style with chilli, salt and turmeric more than most other meals – not just for the taste, but because I know this is truly the food of champions as I saw it leaping for the skies a few hours earlier.

Secondly, despite the misery brigade continuously telling us the earth is going to implode, the human race is more prosperous and better fed than ever before. But ironically this also means that the days of cheap meat are gone forever.

Cow flatulence

The exploding middle class in China and India can now afford meat and are consuming it with gusto. All the horror stories we get in the West about how red meat is a killer and flatulent cows will blow the ozone layer to shreds is completely lost on the emerging world. They can afford meat and they are going to eat it as our DNA dictates.

To me, this exponentially rocketing cost necessitates better management of your meals. Thus if you are a meat eater, you need alternative means of preparation. I have now taken quite an interest in smoking and curing food to make it go further.

You will not be surprised to learn that a key element here is biltong – and my first batch is due this week. The jury is still out on whether it will taste like my school’s rubbery eggs or the mouth-watering stuff expats dream about. I live in hope.

Management is crucial here as she has been a home processor far longer than I have. She has for some time now made her own jams and sauces. Whenever I open the fridge I see a bottle of sourdough yeast that will be raising bread for the rest of our lives.

So a couple of weeks ago we went to Makro and emerged with an electric mincer and several kilograms of lean beef that is going to keep us in boerewors for the next two months.

Of equal interest to me is a biltong machine we ‘inherited’ from a South African, as English weather is not exactly conducive to curing meat. It’s just a large Tupperware with an incandescent light bulb (banned by the European Union) and humidifier duct-taped to a hole in the side. There’re several horizontal poles to string up the meat and a couple of drilled vents to circulate air. And that’s it.

Management also is curing bacon as she’s sick of the water-injected greyish-matter we get in supermarkets. This is trickier stuff as she uses Prague Powder which can contain botulism, so I haven’t quite graduated to that level yet.

But hey, anyone who’s survived rubber yolks and frog’s eggs at boarding school is hardly going to be put off by a little botulism.