Carol’s Column
There's nothing like a good chew
A SHRILL scream rent the air making the light bulbs tinkle and the cat jump.
I leapt downstairs, flying on my flat feet, losing my acrylic drip-dry wig en route.
To find my mother-in-law looking like a stricken kipper, pale and white, her eyes wide and staring.
There, making a dreadful mess on the primrose, cork-backed tiles, lay a huge, bloody corpse.
"What have you done to him, what have you done to my little boy?" she shrieked.
In a rather distressed tone of voice I thought.
"Good grief, that's not Rob, that's an eland," I replied.
"It is?" she peered closely. "Mind you, his nose has more definition," she said.
You might be wondering why a huge, recently expired buck was lying, rigor mortis long gone, in my neat little kitchen with its gaily-painted spice racks and orange bread bin.
Simple. It all stemmed from something I'd said a few nights previously.
In the true tradition of a full-blooded South African, I felt like a lengthy chew.
"Huh, I'd give anything for a piece of biltong," I murmured while watching a gripping episode of Barbara Woodhouse on TV. And thought nothing further of the statement until the following evening when my husband, always a man of action, came home dragging a sack.
"Ha, ha, brought your Mom for supper," I remarked wittily.
"A surprise for you," he said, depositing it at my feet.
Well I could see from the shape of the sack it wasn't a diamond tiara.
I opened it expectantly and passed out at the sight of the hunk of bloody meat.
"Your biltong," he said, depositing it at my feet.
I thought of my grandmother, a grand old lady of pioneering stock who at the age of 94 thought nothing of going into the bush armed to her false teeth with rifle and great hunting knife.
She'd stalk a fleet-footed antelope until she had it in her sights, then bring it down with a shot between the eyes.
Only once, she'd mislaid her spectacles and in error, mistaken hind for fore and shot the beast in mid rump.
Single-handed, she'd skin the animal and then cut it into neat strips.
Suitably salted, she'd place the strips on surrounding thorn bushes to dry, all the while taking pot shots at any vultures that dared to alight near the meat.
Well, that was many moons ago.
Meanwhile, judging by the smell of the resident lump of meat, it was high time I made biltong.
The art of biltong-making is not difficult, it's just the early preparation that causes problems.
"Cut it into thin strips," said my husband as he opened a beer and retired to his armchair.
It took two hours to carve a path through the outers to the inners and several more to acquire five buckets of stripped meat.
In the throes of hacking, the front doorbell rang.
As so often happens in this household, everyone played deaf which left me to open the door.
A thin, giraffe-shaped young man, selling God plus a reserved space in heaven, smiled weakly, opened his mouth, took one look at me and fled down the garden path.
OK, so I did not look my most immaculate best text cut off in photograph
Later, much later, restored to the stomach of my loving family, I proceeded to spice the biltong.
Throwing coarse salt, coriander, black peppers and vinegar about in gay abandon, the cut-up eland began to glisten.
For 48 hours it marinated tenderly in the buckets, being watched and turned every four hours.
"Don't you think you're overdoing things?" asked my husband as I woke him for the midnight shift. "Isn't it a little silly babysitting biltong"?
My husband erected a special outbuilding in which to house the biltong, with cantilevred roofing and a breezeway. This ensured a gentle wind would waft on to the strips dangling from wire coathangers.
As the days passed, we constructed a viewing platform so that our friends and family could come and watch the miraculous process of creation taking place.
The biltong began harden and in doing so, shrink — so we provided binoculars for a clearer view.
Each day, we tested the biltong by slicing slivers from the bottom.
And then came the day of reckoning. The day of truth.
We all assembled for this solemn occasion, 325 of us, gathered in the cantilevred atrium, the biltong swinging overhead. There was enough champagne to refloat the Titanic.
"Was it necessary to hire an orchestra?" grumbled my spouse who'd somehow wedged himself between the double bass and the bassoon.
We'd asked my mother-in-law to perform the cutting rites.
Well, there is biltong and biltong.
It will suffice to say that last night, when, while watching an enthralling episode of Chainword on TV, I muttered: "I'd give anything for a piece of biltong," my husband made the supreme sacrifice.
He replaced his shoes on his feet, put on his duffle coat, got into his car and popped up to the local cafe.
It's not bad, this processed biltong. Nothing like the real thing mind you.
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Editorial note
Masthead reads "Sunday Express LIVING, July 5, 1981", page 7; 5 July 1981 was a Sunday. The standing head "Carol's COLUMN" is set over a drawing of her, and the column is signed "CAROL LAZAR" at the foot. Photographed three times, as page-138, page-143 and the close-up page-153. The drawing is cropped from page-153, which is much the sharpest of the three; the text is read from page-138, which shows most of the first column. The first column is pasted as a long strip and runs off the bottom edge of every photograph taken of this page. The last line that survives is "OK, so I did not look my most immaculate best", and what followed it, up to where the second column picks up at "Later, much later", is below the frame in all three photographs. The gap is marked in the text. This is a photograph that cropped the page rather than a clipping cut short with scissors, so the words are still on the paper and a fresh photograph would recover them.