Biltong Period COrigin theory CVerified

Biltong is a South African dried meat: thin slices of beef and other meats are seasoned with vinegar, salt, saltpeter, and spices — pepper, coriander, clove — and cured in moving air. In the days before refrigeration it took hold as a preserved food to make meat last, spreading from the travel ration of long journeys inland to the household staple and, in time, the commercial product.

Beef, its main ingredient, is an animal long rooted in this land. Around two thousand years ago, herding peoples — the Khoikhoi among them — brought cattle and sheep to the region of the Cape of Good Hope, and from then on meat was part of daily life. Along with the flesh taken in the hunt, the knowledge of drying it to keep it also lived in the land long before Europeans arrived.

The form biltong takes today was set only after the seventeenth-century Cape colony. The Dutch settlers who made their home here, the people later called Boers, brought the practice of combining the meat already being dried with vinegar, saltpeter, and spices. When that handling — tightening the meat with salt and acid and aroma before drying it — was added, the dried meat known today, with its flavor and its keeping quality, came into being.

Biltong comes with a well-worn origin tale: that seventeenth-century Dutch pioneers invented it from nothing, drying the meat by tucking it under the saddle as they rode across the veld. It is a picturesque story, one that suits the image of settlers crossing the wilderness.

But the anecdote does not hold up. Horses came into serious use at the Cape only later, as colonization advanced, and it is hard to imagine meat being dried under a saddle in the earliest days of settlement. More to the point, the tale paints over the whole history of dried meat that came before the settlers.

Drying meat to preserve it was an old custom the Khoikhoi and other indigenous herders had long practiced with local cattle and hunted game. Recent meat research (Erasmus & Hoffman, 2017) traces the direct ancestor of today's biltong to exactly that indigenous dried meat — meat fire-roasted and air-dried to keep. What the seventeenth-century Boers did was to lay the vinegar, saltpeter, and spice treatment over that old dried meat and refine it into the biltong of today.

The word "biltong" appears in writing far later. The oldest attested use is in an 1815 English translation of Lichtenstein's travels in South Africa. But the year a word was set down is not the year the food was born. The old stratum of dried meat rooted in the land, and the vinegar-and-spice handling layered on in the colonial period — those two stages of the story are far older than the word's first appearance.