THE WORD biltong comes from the old High Dutch word bille, today’s Afrikaans equivalent of which is boude, meaning hindquarters or buttocks, and another Dutch word tong, meaning tongue or tongue-shaped. The parts of the animal most commonly used for bil-tong were the hindquarters, and the strips of raw meat resemble tongues, hence the name.I have always been intrigued by the enigma that is biltong. I mean, when you consider what it is – raw meat that has been salted and dried until hard and tough to chew – face it, it doesn’t sound like much, does it? When I describe it to foreigners, they wrinkle their noses in disgust.
So what is it about this stuff that makes South Africans pursue it as though it holds the secret to happiness and eternal youth? Consider the insane price that it retails for – have you ever checked the weight on that little cello-phane packet of sliced biltong and calculated the per-kilogram cost of it? It’ll make you wonder why biltong isn’t traded on the hard assets exchange. Yet there is not a
