Talk:Biltong/Archives/2023/September
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Drying meat is an old, old process.
This almost seems to suggest that South Africans invented the process of drying meat and using various herbs to preserve it (as opposed to Europeans, who were apparently the only other ones who knew how to preserve meat, but who used brine instead of drying). Humans of all cultures have been aware of how to dry, smoke, salt, or otherwise preserve meat. It was a universal practice, needed by everyone who wanted to use all of the meat they killed, unless they were lucky enough to live in a place where game was abundant and not too large, so it could be killed an eaten fresh every day. Meat preserved for traveling was also a universal need at one point, and salt was a precious substance for most of history. I would also personally question whether Afrikaaners even invented this particular form of drying meat. More likely it was a practice they adopted from the natives who already lived there and who had just as much need to preserve their meat as the Afrikaaners (and also had to travel, well before the Dutch began fleeing British territory. This sounds like semi-mythologized 'history' such as favored by South African biltong producers. There is nothing special about biltong, it just happens to be one of the few forms of dried meat that survived as a snack food after the need for it vanished.