Pressing in Biltong’s Past: From Horse-Sweat to Pressing Boards

By Eben van Tonder, 15 September 2025

Dedicated to Etienne, in celebration of his passion for meat.

Table of Contents

Introduction

This article follows directly from my earlier work, Saltpeter, Horse Sweat, and Biltong: The Origins of Our National Food (van Tonder 2023a), and examines an overlooked practice of pressing in the development of biltong.

Biltong is often described as a simple dried meat, yet its history shows it was the result of complex, layered techniques. Pressing, in particular, appears in transitional recipes and provides a bridge between indigenous drying, European curing, and frontier improvisation.

Pressing in Early Sources

Early accounts of biltong often emphasise salting, vinegar, and drying, but pressing appears occasionally in descriptions and recipes. Its absence in much literature should not be taken as absence in practice.

Jones et al. (2017) reviewed South African biltong production and noted how research has focused on salting and drying but that “effects of various processing methods on physico-chemical characteristics have not been fully investigated.” This suggests mechanical elements like pressing have been underexplored. Similarly, Mediani et al. (2022) in their review of dried meats emphasise drying, spicing, and acidification but do not single out pressing—yet such silence highlights the need to recognise unrecorded practices.

In my own earlier work (Saltpeter, Horse Sweat, and Biltong), I showed that strips carried under saddles underwent pressure and nitrate absorption from sweat. This is pressing by another name: physical pressure combined with chemical curing.

The Old Cape “Transition” Recipe

The Cape recipe is invaluable because it explicitly includes pressing. After three days of rubbing with salt, brown sugar, and saltpetre, the beef is “put under a press for a night,” then dried in wind and chimney smoke, before being cut into “very thin slices—or rasped.”

This recipe reflects three important elements. First, the sweet cure: equal parts salt and sugar show the heavy balance typical of 19th-century European cures (Davidson 2014). Second, the saltpetre: its inclusion reflects knowledge of its preservative and colour-fixing role, paralleling European bacon and ham making (Parolari 1996). Third, the mechanical press: a step that reduced water activity, flattened the cut, and allowed uniform drying.

From Pulverising to Rasping

The instruction to consume biltong by rasping or slicing very thinly resonates with older practices of pulverising dried meat before consumption. Across many cultures—including southern Africa—dried meat was pounded in a mortar or ground on a stone before being rehydrated in stews. Peanuts, or the pulp left after oil extraction, were often added to such preparations, giving body and flavour. As Kuper (1981) noted in his ethnographic survey of southern African foodways, “dried beef was frequently pounded and mixed with vegetable or nut pastes to create nourishing stews” (JSTOR link).

Rasping biltong can therefore be seen as a transitional phase in this trajectory: from pulverised dried meat used in stews, to finely shaved strips eaten directly, and finally to today’s thicker hand-sliced biltong pieces. This continuity reinforces how consumption practices evolved alongside curing methods.

By combining sweet cure, saltpetre, pressing, and thin slicing—or rasping—this recipe bridges indigenous wind-drying with European curing traditions, making it a true “transition recipe.”

Comparing with Pastirma

Pressing is best documented in pastirma, the famous cured meat of Anatolia. This provides a model for interpreting pressing in biltong.

Akköse et al. (2014) describe pastirma’s stages: salting, pressing, drying, coating in çemen spice paste. Pressing reduces moisture, shapes the cut, and aids penetration of curing agents. Aksu et al. (2016) show that pressing significantly lowers water activity and improves uniformity of cure.

Although biltong lacks a heavy spice crust, the old Cape recipe mirrors pastirma’s logic: pressing as an intermediate step between salting and drying. Both practices converge on the same preservation problem—how to keep thick cuts from spoiling before fully drying.

Plant Cures, Indigenous Traditions, and Pressing

In Were Meat in Antiquity Cured with Plants? (van Tonder 2023b), I documented wrapping meat in leaves, rubbing with ashes, or burying it in soil. These methods exerted pressure and exclusion of air, mimicking some effects of pressing.

Thus pressing is not a uniquely European introduction but resonates with indigenous methods of compaction and wrapping. Combined with saddle-weight practices (van Tonder 2023a), pressing forms part of a spectrum of mechanical interventions alongside chemical ones.

How Pressing Was Likely Done

The Cape frontier context offers clues about the mechanics. Pressing could have been achieved with:

Boards and stones: meat laid on planks, weighted with stones overnight.
Barrels and crates: meat layered with boards and pressed under heavy lids.
Saddle weight: strips placed under saddles, pressed by horse and rider, combining sweat and movement.

These methods required no special equipment yet produced significant changes: expelling purge, compacting fibres, and ensuring more uniform drying.

Biltong in Early Tradition

The 1891 article not only provides a recipe for curing and drying beef but also gives us a glimpse into how it was eaten in those days. It specifically suggests enjoying biltong with bread and butter—a practice that resonates with my own childhood memories. On the farm, we often ate it exactly this way, thin slices on buttered bread. Sometimes, it even found its way into our porridge at breakfast. I remember it very well. Today, I am not sure how many people still eat it like that, but it shows how deeply woven into daily life biltong once was.

Other references echo this notion of biltong as a versatile food, especially on long journeys and at sea. Early travel and naval records note how sailors carried it on board, often eating it with ship’s bread. The idea of pairing it with staple starches—bread or porridge—reflects a broader tradition of making preserved meat not only portable but adaptable to the daily meal (Burchell, 1822; Scully, 1992).

The recipe also hints at another element that is worth pausing on: after being rubbed and pressed, the meat was dried first in the wind and then “hung in the chimney.” This step points to a likely smoking stage. Such a process aligns more closely with European methods of ham curing than with the air-dried biltong we know today. The chimney would not only dry the meat but expose it to smoke, lending flavour and preservation qualities reminiscent of continental hams (Davidson, 1999; Toussaint-Samat, 2009). This suggests that what was called “biltong” in the Cape at that time may have straddled two worlds—the African practice of air-drying meat and the European tradition of smoking it in chimneys.

The Recipe (1891)

Take about six or eight pounds of beef, cut out in a long-tongue shape, out of the hind leg of an ox, from the thigh-bone down to the knee-joint. There are two such pieces in each leg, being quite encased in a fleecy skin. Take this meat, which is quite free from sinew or fat, first rub it with a little salt, and an hour after rub in well half a pound of salt, ditto brown sugar, and an ounce of saltpetre. Leave for three days, rubbing and turning every day; then put it under a press for a night. Have it dried in the wind, and then hung in the chimney till it is dry and pretty firm. When eaten, it is to be cut into very thin slices—or rasped.

Implications for Biltong’s Story

The presence of pressing in the 1891 recipe reshapes how we think about biltong’s development. Rather than being only a rustic form of dried meat, biltong emerges as a deliberately engineered product that combined several overlapping preservation strategies: the sweet-saltpetre cure, mechanical pressing, careful slicing, vinegar application, and staged drying.

Seen in this light, biltong belongs in the same conversation as other great cured meats such as pastirma or prosciutto, where physical manipulation was as critical as chemical treatment. Pressing, in particular, appears as a transitional technique—a bridge between indigenous air-drying traditions and the codified recipes of the colonial Cape.

Conclusion

The old Cape recipe demonstrates that pressing was not incidental but integral to early biltong-making. When placed alongside horse-sweat curing, plant wrapping, and the European use of sugar and saltpetre, pressing reveals another layer of ingenuity in the craft. The history of biltong is therefore not only a chemical narrative of salts, sugars, and acids, but also a mechanical one, where pressure and handling played an equally defining role. Pressing deserves recognition as one of the foundational tools—alongside salt, sugar, and vinegar—that shaped South Africa’s national food.

References

Akköse, A., et al. (2014). Curing and diffusion coefficient study in pastırma, a Turkish-type dry-cured meat product. Meat Science, 96(1), 79–84. Available at: ScienceDirect
Aksu, M.I., Kaya, M., & Ockerman, H.W. (2016). Changes in the physico-chemical and microbial quality of pastirma during processing stages. Korean Journal for Food Science of Animal Resources, 36(5), 617–625. Available at: kosfaj.org
Burchell, W.J. (1822). Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, Vol. 1–2. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. Available at: Internet Archive
Davidson, A. (1999). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: Google Books
Davidson, A. (2014). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: Oxford Reference
Jones, M., Arnaud, E., Gouws, P., & Hoffman, L.C. (2017). Processing of South African biltong – A review. South African Journal of Animal Science, 47(6), 743–757. Available at: ResearchGate
Kuper, A. (1981). Tradition, economic categories and subsistence practices: An anthropological study of food in southern Africa. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 51(2), 447–464. Available at: JSTOR
Mediani, A., Hamezah, H.S., Faidruz, A., & Abas, F. (2022). A comprehensive review of drying meat products and the associated effects and changes. Foods, 11(23), 3683. Available at: PMC
Parolari, G. (1996). Cured meats, nitrates, nitrites and safety: A review. Food Additives & Contaminants, 13(6), 691–708. Available at: Taylor & Francis Online
Scully, P. (1992). Colonial Encounters: South Africa 1806–1910. Cape Town: David Philip. Available at: Google Books
Toussaint-Samat, M. (2009). A History of Food. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: Wiley
van Tonder, E. (2023a). Saltpeter, Horse Sweat, and Biltong: The Origins of Our National Food. EarthwormExpress. Available at: EarthwormExpress
van Tonder, E. (2023b). Were Meat in Antiquity Cured with Plants? EarthwormExpress. Available at: EarthwormExpress